Many of the public retailers that sell exclusively on the web have had a good 2017 thus far. For the first half of the year, the 10 publicly traded web-only retailers grew online sales more than 20%, outpacing overall growth in the U.S. e-commerce market of 15.5% during the same timeframe, according to U.S. Commerce Department figures.
But it’s not all good news. The driving force in all of retail is Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, and without the retail giant, the remaining nine companies grew just 9% as a whole in the first two quarters of 2017.
So far this year, Amazon has been busy strengthening its foothold in multiple, fast-growing product categories. Thanks in large part to growing sales of its private-label clothing lines, Amazon is now the leading online apparel retailer in the U.S., according to Internet Retailer’s 2017 Apparel Report.
It acquired grocery chain Whole Foods and within hours of the deal closing, Amazon began slashing prices in stores and delivering Whole Foods’ products to online shoppers via its fast Prime Now delivery service. It also launched a social network called Spark, and Amazon Prime Day, the fake holiday it created in 2015 during what was historically the slowest month in all of retail, and a $2 billion event this year.