Of the 10 largest public online apparel merchants that break out ecommerce guidance on a quarterly basis, Digital Commerce 360 projects seven of them will decrease their online sales in 2022. As a group, they will only grow 1.1% in 2022 compared with 2021, after online sales grew 8.4% year over year in 2021 for the group.

More than half of these publicly traded merchants are retail chains, and several are consumer brand manufacturers operating hundreds of stores.

Historically, the lion’s share of their sales occurred in stores. During 2020, however, web sales boomed for apparel merchants as customers avoided stores. And that ecommerce penetration reached nearly 50% of total sales.

Further, as customers get back to normal shopping behavior, many go back to stores to shop for apparel and accessories. Still, some continue to shop online. These types of swings in consumer behavior are evident in the ecommerce penetration figures for these top merchants that also operate stores.

73% of online apparel customers said they’d purchased clothing from Amazon.com, the most popular response in our Digital Commerce 360/ Bizrate Insights customer survey of 1,064 online shoppers in September 2022. Walmart.com was second most popular at 42% and Target.com fourth at 28%. This is up from our 2021 consumer survey, when 66% of consumers said they bought apparel on Amazon.com, 36% Walmart.com and 23% on Target.com.