Takeaway: We hit the point where e-commerce dollar growth surpassed Brick & Mortar. 2016 is officially ‘Game On’ for financial impact of e-comm.

Editor's Note: This is a brief excerpt from an institutional research note written by Hedgeye Retail analysts Brian McGough and Alec Richards. To access our institutional research please email sales@hedgeye.com.

A Paradigm Shift In Retail Is Happening - z retail

Today’s 60bp negative revision for January Retail Sales (from +0.2 to -0.4%) was obviously disappointing, albeit not terribly surprising to anyone listening to retail conference calls over the past four weeks...

Let’s step away from the obvious for a minute and look at a powerful trend that’s actually investable...

Today, e-commerce accounts for 7.3% of total Retail Sales. A decade ago that number was 2.5%, and five years ago it was 4.4%. At face value we’re talking really small numbers…right? Not really. Consider this…in the fourth quarter, e-commerce accounted for 65% of all incremental Retail Sales

A Paradigm Shift In Retail Is Happening - retail sales 22 

That’s S-I-X-T-Y F-I-V-E percent! This ramped from 23% a year ago, and 45% in the prior quarter.