Niche online brands are surging as stay-at-home orders lead to spike in e-commerce sales

Consumers have spent the past couple decades shifting their spending habits to the internet. Now, with local stores closed and millions of people social distancing, the web has become — by default — the place we shop.

In a tweet last week that went viral, industry newsletter 2PM posted the words, “10 years vs. 8 weeks,” followed by a chart showing that e-commerce penetration climbed to 27% from 16% in just eight weeks of quarantine. That was the same amount of market share growth it achieved over the prior decade.

Amazon, unsurprisingly, has been the biggest single beneficiary, focusing on essential household and medical items. Beyond the e-retailing giant, consumers have flocked to the websites of Walmart, Target and Best Buy, which all saw surging online sales in the first quarter at the expense of physical retail.

But there’s a wide swath of smaller sites and niche brands that were built for the internet shopper and are now seeing spikes in their business that they never could have anticipated.