Has e-commerce peaked?

THREE YEARS AGO, as lockdowns forced consumers to move much of their spending online, a appeared to be dawning. Optimistic investors, convinced that shoppers would keep buying on the internet, lifted valuations of e-merchants to frothy heights. Retailers old and new raced to expand delivery networks.Today those heady days look like a distant memory. On August 3rd , the world’s largest online retailer, reported 11% year-on-year growth for the second quarter of the year, excluding its cloud-computing division. That was better than expected—and provoked a roughly 10% jump in the company’s share price. Yet it was a fraction of the 42% sales growth that Amazon reported for the same quarter in 2020, and slower than the giant’s pre-pandemic trend. The same day Wayfair, an online purveyor of furniture that surged amid covid-19, reported its ninth consecutive quarter of declining sales.