Bigcommerce Predicts Record Ecommerce Growth in 2015
E-commerce as a segment of the total retail market is growing at 30% per year and will reach $2 trillion in sales in 2015, according to e-commerce platform Bigcommerce.
Based on research conducted across its more than 55,000 clients, and combined with third-party research from Sagence, Bigcommerce’s Democratization of E-commerce Report also predicts that the U.S. small and medium business ecommerce market will exceed $100 billion in total sales in 2015.
“We’re seeing significant growth in e-commerce across all categories, but particularly with small and medium-size businesses,” said Trent Edwards, principal at Sagence. “At $100 billion, the U.S. SMB ecommerce market will top the combined worldwide annual revenues of the country’s two largest ecommerce companies, Amazon and eBay.”
The meteoric rise of e-commerce has disrupted the worldwide economy with total ecommerce spending expected to eclipse the gross domestic product of all but the top 10 countries next year, according to the new report.
Twenty years after the first recorded online transaction — Sting’s CD, Ten Summoner’s Tales — e-commerce is now a worldwide market made up of merchants ranging from multi-national retailers to single owner-operator small businesses. While the earliest days of e-commerce were dominated by well-established, brick-and-mortar retailers seeking to establish new revenue streams, best-of-breed technologies have allowed new market entrants to quickly grow market share and revenues by more rapidly responding to changing market dynamics.
“As recently as 10 years ago, starting an e-commerce business required significant capital, as well as an army of technical, marketing and financial experts to build the necessary infrastructure,” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and CEO of Bigcommerce. “Today, business owners can create an online store in 30 minutes and compete against brands 100 times their size, at a fraction of the cost.”
Click here to read the Democratization of E-commerce Report.