Ecommerce Driving Steep Declines in Retail Foot Traffic

The startling chart below shows shows retail foot traffic is rapidly and dramatically declining.  

It's from the Wall Street Journal article Stores Confront New World of Reduced Shopper Traffic.  Key quote:

"Retailers got only about half the holiday traffic in 2013 as they did just three years earlier, according to ShopperTrak, which uses a network of 60,000 shopper-counting devices to track visits at malls and large retailers across the country. The data firm tracked declines of 28.2% in 2011, 16.3% in 2012 and 14.6% in 2013."

The reason, of course, is growing online sales.

But people aren't just buying online. They're also increasingly browsing online and then going to stores to make purchases. As the article points out, this also reduces the amount of time they spend shopping in the physical world:

"While shoppers visited an average five stores per mall trip in 2007, today they only visit three, ShopperTrak's data shows."

What make this data even more significant is ecommerce is still only about 6% of overall retail sales. Despite this small share, its already substantially reshaping consumer behavior.  

Imagine what this chart will look like when ecommerce gets to 25%.

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[E.S Akshay]

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