E-commerce accounted for roughly 17 percent of total U.S. retail sales by late 2025, per the Census Bureau's Quarterly Retail E-Commerce report — up from about 11 percent at the pandemic's start and roughly 5 percent a decade earlier. The long trend is steady: a point or two of share gained per year, accelerating through the pandemic, reverting briefly, then resuming. What the headline conceals is the dispersion behind it: online already takes 30–45 percent in electronics, apparel, and books, while groceries — the largest retail category — sit near 8 to 12 percent, and gasoline and autos, which anchor the denominator, barely sell online at all.
The Daily News 24 publishes information, not investment advice. Figures are Census Bureau datasets.
How is the share measured?
Census surveys retailers monthly and separates e-commerce — sales where the order is placed online — from in-store. Definitional edges matter: store-fulfilled online orders count as e-commerce; online orders picked up in store (BOPIS) count as e-commerce; food services are excluded from the retail total entirely. The series is quarterly, revised annually, and the denominator excludes services, so "17 percent of retail" is 17 percent of goods, not of consumer spending — services are the majority of the economy and largely offline.
Why is grocery the stubborn category?
Three structural reasons, each documented in retailer disclosures: basket economics (a weekly $80 grocery order is expensive to pick and deliver relative to its margin), product characteristics (fresh produce selected by hand resists substitution), and fulfillment cost structure (grocers report online baskets profitable only above fees or order minimums that many shoppers decline). The result is that grocery e-commerce hovers near high single digits to low teens of category sales even as Instacart-style marketplaces and Walmart's pickup network expand it. Grocery's share of total retail is so large that the national e-commerce number moves slowly precisely because this category moves slowly.
What drove the pandemic reshuffle?
The 2020 spike — e-commerce jumping about five share points in a year — was a forced trial at national scale. The partial give-back in 2021–2022 as stores reopened was real but incomplete: each post-pandemic year has left the share above its pre-2020 trend line's projection. Census data through 2024–2025 shows the share grinding higher again as retail media, faster delivery, and returns infrastructure reduce the online friction that remain.
Where is the ceiling?
Comparisons bound the answer: the U.K. and China run higher online shares of retail — China's exceeds a quarter by official statistics — while U.S. category structure (car dealers and gas stations alone are over 20 percent of the retail denominator) caps the aggregate number. The realistic projection embedded in analyst models is low-20s U.S. share by the early 2030s, with groceries, home improvement, and autos providing the remaining gain. Category ceilings, not a national one, are the operative concept.
What distorts quarter-to-quarter readings?
Seasonality — Q4's holiday mix lifts the online share mechanically — plus gasoline price moves that inflate or deflate the offline denominator, and the annual rebenchmarking that restates the series. The reading habit that survives all three: compare same-quarter year over year, and watch the category detail rather than the headline.
For more context, read Retail Sales Fall 0.6% in July as Inflation Holds at 3.4%.
For more context, read grocery margins.