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For a long time, we have been committed to exploring the current status of the industry, tracking market trends, and hoping to find more new development trends. During this exploration, we found that due to multiple factors such as cultural customs and consumer consumption habits in different markets, cross-border practitioners face many obstacles in entering other markets. How to understand consumer consumption habits based on the characteristics of different markets, formulate marketing strategies based on local conditions, seize the opportunity to go overseas, and drive sales growth has also become a difficult problem for cross-border practitioners going overseas.
To this end, we have set up a special column for interpreting the e-commerce market to provide e-commerce interpretations in different markets for cross-border practitioners, and took the lead in completing this "2023 North American E-commerce Market Insight Report" .
This report covers content interpretations from multiple dimensions, including e-commerce market prospects and challenges , mainstream e-commerce platforms , consumer characteristics and consumption habits , product selection trends , major marketing nodes , logistics conditions , etc. It is hoped that this "2023 North American E-commerce Market Insight Report" can provide more help for cross-border practitioners in their market development. The following is the essence of the report: The North American e-commerce market still has a lot of room for growth In 2023, the U.S. e-commerce market will remain a global leader. Despite problems such as inflation and overstocking, the U.S. e-commerce market will still achieve strong growth, with sales exceeding the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 2022 . It is worth mentioning that both mobile e-commerce and social e-commerce in the United States have grown significantly. Data shows that mobile e-commerce sales in the United States increased by 26.3% over the previous year, accounting for 38.4% of total retail e-commerce. In 2022, e-commerce sales initiated or completed on social media platform websites in the United States totaled US$53.1 million (US$39.5 million in 2021), accounting for 5.1% of all online sales. Despite the increasing risk of recession and continued sluggish consumer demand, the U.S. e-commerce market remains capable of meeting these challenges. At the same time, Canada is close to the United States and is one of the important markets for cross-border e-commerce in the United States . Not only is the logistics and transportation efficient and accurate, but the tax rate is also more favorable than that in the United States. With the dual advantages of relatively low logistics costs and exchange rates, Canadian consumers' enthusiasm for online shopping continues to rise. Compared with the United States, Canada has many problems, such as vast land, sparse population, limited market, low investment enthusiasm of small and medium-sized enterprises, no national unified consumer protection law, lack of e-commerce professionals, and weak e-commerce clusters, which have brought considerable challenges to the development of its e-commerce market. But overall, the North American e-commerce market still has a lot of room for growth. What drives North American consumer purchases? It is learned that according to the 2022 data of the U.S. Census Bureau, the total population of the United States is estimated to be 333.3 million. In 2022, more than 177 million consumers in the United States participated in online shopping. By 2023, the proportion of online shopping users in the United States still showed a good growth trend. In addition, the average online shopping expenditure of American consumers has also shown a trend of significant increase year by year. It is worth noting that as the purchasing power of Generation Z gradually increases, it will become the largest online consumer group in the United States by 2025. This group will account for 20% of the US population, and the potential for online shopping consumption is huge. For the Generation Z consumer group, cross-border practitioners need to readjust their deployment to meet the new changes in consumer demand. In general, facing such a large consumer group in the United States, it is particularly important to understand their consumption characteristics and habits. In 2023, American consumers will pay more attention to commodity prices and value . Data shows that 66% of American consumers prefer to buy large retailers' own brands rather than independent brands, mainly because private brands are cheaper. However, Generation Z and Millennials are exceptions because they are more likely to contact independent brands through social media. At the same time, the purchasing decisions of consumers in the middle and low-income groups are more influenced by price, while the decisions of high-income earners are more dependent on the value of the product. In addition to the price and value of goods, American consumers are increasingly using new technologies in the purchasing process and they also expect a more convenient online shopping experience . Nowadays, social shopping is becoming a new consumption habit , and authenticity is the main factor promoting consumers' social shopping. Canada is adjacent to the United States, and the characteristics and consumption habits of its online shopping consumers are very similar to those of the United States. Competition among mainstream e-commerce platforms is fierce Whether in the US or Canadian e-commerce market, the total number of visits to Amazon's e-commerce platform is far ahead. As of August 2023, Amazon's total number of visits in the United States and Canada reached 2.5 billion and 182 million, respectively. eBay ranked second, with total visits in the United States and Canada reaching 722 million and 182 million, respectively. In addition, Walmart, Home Depot and other e-commerce platforms are relatively active in the North American e-commerce market, and the total visits to these platforms can be said to be comparable. It is worth mentioning that with the rise of China’s “Four Little Dragons Going Global”, competition in the North American e-commerce market has become increasingly fierce. Temu, which focuses on full-hosting, quickly entered and opened up overseas markets at ultra-low prices, capturing the minds of consumers in a very short time; TikTok also recently officially opened its e-commerce service TikTok Shop to US users; and SHEIN also launched the third-party platform model SHEIN Marketplace this year. Interpretation of the latest product selection trends in North America Generally speaking, the hot-selling categories every month are regular. The "2023 North American E-commerce Market Insight Report" also lists the popular categories from January to December, and the specific content can be found in the report. However, with the development of the times, the most popular online shopping categories in the United States have also changed accordingly. According to RetailX's "2022 US E-commerce Report", the most popular online shopping categories in the United States in 2022 are clothing, accessories and footwear . Due to the rise and popularity of smartphones, consumer electronics ranked second with 40% of online purchases, followed by books at 38%. Clothing accessories and computer consumer electronics are the most important categories of e-commerce sales in the United States . Before the epidemic, they accounted for more than 40% of e-commerce sales in the United States. In the future, they will continue to be important drivers of e-commerce sales, but the online sales share of other categories will also increase, and the online sales share of each category will be more evenly distributed. In 2022, almost all industries in Canada, except clothing, achieved growth. In the Canadian e-commerce market, its beauty category performed strongly, and household products, kitchen products, and snow sports products were in high demand and were favored by consumers. The North American e-commerce market has long been a mature market. Old e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Walmart have long been entrenched in the market, while newcomers such as Temu, Shein, and TikTok Shop have also joined the North American e-commerce market. Although the competition in the North American e-commerce market has become fierce, it also implies more development opportunities. As one of the most mature e-commerce markets in the world, the North American e-commerce market still has a large room for growth to be explored by cross-border practitioners. More insight reports on the mainstream e-commerce market will be released in the future. Cross-border practitioners are welcome to continue to pay attention to the series of columns on e-commerce market interpretation. This report is originally produced by the [Report Team] and may not be reproduced without authorization.
Since 2022, the reporting team has produced multiple industry and market insight reports for sub-sectors such as [cross-border e-commerce industry], [DTC brand going overseas], [Amazon category operation], and [e-commerce market research] , which have attracted great attention and forwarding in the industry and received praise from many cross-border professionals. (For report content and business cooperation, please contact: happy)
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We would like to thank the following partners for their strong support for this report (in no particular order): SellerSprite, Brand Ark, Oulu, Xiaguangshe, EchoTik, Baixiaosheng, Shenzhen Cross-border E-commerce Association, Yangfanchuhai, and Blue Ocean Yiguan.com.
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