Digital Commerce 360’s 2022 edition of the Top 1000 database, which ranks the largest online retailers in North America based on their 2021 web sales, is officially live. Our analysts have been busy studying the financial performance of the big players on this list and digging into other key performance metrics to identify ecommerce trends for our Top 1000 analysis report, which launches later this month. Here’s a sneak peek of some of our findings…

How did big retailers vs. SMBs grow online sales in 2021?

The upper echelon of the Top 1000 online retailers — those taking the Top 500 spots in the rankings — represented more than 96% of the larger group’s collective $1.01 trillion in 2021 ecommerce sales.

The Top 500 giants — like Amazon.com Inc. (No. 1 in the Top 1000), Walmart Inc. (No. 2), The Home Depot Inc. (No. 4) and Target Corp. (No. 5) — dominated retail headlines during the first year of the pandemic thanks to their large fulfillment networks and the explosion of demand for omnichannel services. But while this Top 500 cohort collectively increased online revenue by 45.7% year over year in 2020, their web sales growth slowed significantly to 15.5% in 2021. That was because shoppers returned to brick-and-mortar stores, and buy online, pick up in store and curbside offerings became less critical post-vaccine. Even so, these big names largely managed to maintain pandemic-driven gains in their digital divisions and even build upon them.

Meanwhile, the Second 500 online retailers — those ranked Nos. 501-1000 with $133.7 million or under in 2021 web sales — saw less fluctuation in their web sales growth during the last couple of years. This cohort may not have capitalized as much on the 2020 surge in ecommerce as shoppers turned to more familiar names with deeper supply chain connections, growing at 24.5%, or roughly half the rate of the Top 500. But the Second 500’s SMBs grew at a faster clip than the Top 500 in 2021 at 21.9% — driving up the performance of the overall Top 1000, which reached 15.7%.