Changing retail trends - in particular the rise of online shopping - are one of the biggest topics that we cover at Econsultancy and one that we've been writing about more or less since the beginning.

But even within online retail (ecommerce) alone, we've seen huge shifts and changes over time - online retail in 2019 looks completely different to online retail in 2009. Over the past decade or more we've seen changes in device usage, shopping channels, and global markets. Ecommerce is impacting everything from parcel deliveries to grocery shopping; some of the changes are smaller, or slower, than we might have expected, while others are bigger than we appreciated.

Here are 20 statistics (plus a few extras) that illustrate the most important changes taking place in online retail.

(And remember, Econsultancy subscribers can access thousands more stats in the Internet Statistics Database.)

The growth of ecommerce

1) Online has grown steadily as a percentage of retail sales since 2000

Mary Meeker's 2019 Internet Trends report looked back over the growth of ecommerce as a percentage of total retail sales in the US, from Q1 2000 to Q1 of 2019.

The graph shows a steady climb from around 1% of retail sales in 2000 to close to 16% in 2019. Growth appears to have been relatively consistent with the exception of the period between Q4 2007 and Q4 2008 where it plateaued at around and then dropped slightly - most likely because of the recession - before recovering in Q1 2009.