The Census Bureau’s Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS) first released data in 1952 and now produces national estimates of total annual sales, e-commerce sales, sales taxes, end-of-year inventories, purchases, total operating expenses, per capita sales, and gross margins of U.S. retail businesses.
Seven decades of data provide a window into historical retail trends. For example, ARTS first collected data on e-commerce in 1998, when online sales were just $5.0 billion and online retail was just emerging as an irreversible force. More than 20 years later, e-commerce sales top $800 billion.
According to the most recent 2020 ARTS release, e-commerce sales increased by $244.2 billion or 43% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, rising from $571.2 billion in 2019 to $815.4 billion in 2020.
