Facts About America's Top 500 E-Retailers

By any measure, the 500 largest e-retailers in the U.S. that are ranked and profiled in detail in the Top 500 Guide®, are the trailblazers of the $168 billion web-based retailing industry. Understanding them and how they achieved their leadership position provides a valuable lesson to all e-retailers on how to succeed in this growing segment of the retailing industry. To get a better idea of their power and scope as a group, here are some summary facts of the 500 e-retailers ranked in the 2009 Top 500 Guide®:

Growth Driver: As a group, the Top 500 grew their online sales by 11.7% in 2008 and accounted for a total of $115.9 billion of the nation's $178.2 billion in online retail sales.

Online Sales by Industry: A total of 152 (or 30%) of the Top 500 e-retail businesses in the U.S. are owned by store-based retail chains, 86 (or 17%) by catalog and direct-marketing firms, 56 (or 11%) by consumer branded manufacturers and 206 (or 41%) by web-only retailers. Because they control an even larger share of the biggest sites, retail chains accounted for 38.9% of online sales reported by the Top 500 in 2008, catalogers 17.2%, manufacturers 12.1% and pure plays 31.8%.

Top 100 Dominate: The Top 500 e-retailers account for 69.1% of all online sales, but the top 100 dominate. The top 100 control 55.3% of retail web sales.

The Web Outpaces Stores: While many chain retailers' web sales were growing, their comparable store sales were shrinking. In fact at 41 of the 50 biggest Top 500 chains in 2008, e-commerce revenue grew as comparable store sales declined. And at six, web sales declined, but not nearly as much as comparable store sales.

The $1 Billion Group: In 2008, fully 27 companies recorded online retail sales of $1 billion or more compared to just 21 the prior year.

Category Sales: Last year five of 14 merchandising categories in the Top 500—apparel/accessories, computers/electronics, health/beauty, mass merchant and specialty/non-apparel—exceeded or grew at the same rate as the overall e-commerce market.

Winners & Losers: In percentage terms, Charlotte Russe Holding Inc. achieved the best e-retail sales growth among the Top 500 with a 633% gain. Meanwhile Tempur-Pedic International Inc. turned in the worst performance with a decline of 40.3% in online sales. While the mass merchant sector grew fastest online with a 20% growth rate in 2008, the runner-up was not far behind. Online toys/hobbies retailers grew their combined sales by 19% to $1.2 billion from $1.0 billion in 2007. The merchants in the largest category (in terms of numbers of merchants) in the Top 500 Guide®—apparel/accessories—continued to show that shoppers have no qualms with buying fashions online. Combined 2008 web sales for this group rose by 12% to $14.0 billion.

Social Networking Takes Hold: Almost three-fourths of this year's Top 500 e-retailers have a presence on one of the major social networking or social shopping sites. Of the 361 web merchants who are active on one or more of those sites, 284—or 79%—have a page or advertise on Facebook and 207—57%—have a video or commercial posted on YouTube.

Growing Executive Base: The 2009 Edition of the Top 500 Guide® provides contact information on 1,700 executives in the e-retailing industry.

Solution Providers: GSI Commerce Inc. was the most named e-commerce technology provider across multiple categories in the vendor listings of the Top 500 Guide®. GSI Commerce topped the vendor list with 332 mentions and was followed by Omniture Inc. with 280, Google Inc. at 258, Commission Junction at 209 and Coremetrics Inc. at 125.