The online sales growth of retailers that operate physical stores slowed in 2021 because more shoppers felt comfortable returning to their stores as COVID-19 infection rates eased. But the overall impact of the pandemic was to shift more retail chains’ sales to the web.

And these retailers added more services to make it more convenient to shop with them both digitally and physically. The 142 store-based retailers in the Top 500 saw their share of Top 500 web sales fall 1.2 percentage points to 33.2% from a year earlier, which was still higher than the 31.8% recorded in 2019.

The pandemic changed the way we live and how we shop. Because the coronavirus outbreak has gone on now for more than two years, it’s worth looking at growth in web sales of various types of goods through a two-year lens as well as year over year. Looking at 2020 and 2021 together, the most dramatic gain — and in fact, the only triple-digit gain — was in web sales of food and beverage. The 25 retailers in that category in the Top 500 more than doubled their collective ecommerce revenue in that two-year period, increasing sales 111.4%.