Chart: Retail Apocalypse 2017

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

The steady rise of online retail sales should have surprised no one.

Back in 2000, less than 1% of retail sales came from e-commerce. However, online sales have climbed each and every year since then, even through the Great Recession. By 2009, e-commerce made up about 4.0% of total retail sales, and today the latest number we have is 8.3%.

Here’s another knowledge bomb: it’s going to keep growing for the foreseeable future. Huge surprise, right?

Signs of a Reckoning

Retailers eye their competition relentlessly, and the sector also has notoriously thin margins.

The big retailers must have seen the “retail apocalypse” coming. The question is: what did they do about it?

Well, companies like Sears failed the shift to digital altogether – in fact, it is even widely speculated that the former behemoth might file for bankruptcy later this year.

The majority of other companies, on the other

Some may say that technical analysis is 'bunk' but it's just that which caused me to short AMZN.  Now you can say they're #1 when it comes to online sales but my question is, has their growth hit a plateau?  Trading at 170x p/e, anything is possible. (click chart to enlarge).  Talk is that MSFT is bringing the smart home to Windows. The feature will allow Cortana to be summoned on any Windows 10 PC lock screen.  It's expected to appear in Win 10 updates starting in 2017 and this software-only feature could trump AMZN Echo and GOOG Home due to the obvious convenience of screen access.  From an investor point of view, I would definitely take some off the table at this point and invest it in banks, industrials and insurers.  But let's take a look at sales.  No growth in 2016?  Now that's interesting.

Amazon sports some pretty startling numbers. Let’s dive into various reports for a close look.

Amazon captured 31% of online spending over Cyber Weekend

CNBC reports Amazon captured 31%

When Jack Ma founded the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba in 1999, one of his stated goals was to build a company that will last for at least 102 years so that it would span from the 20th to the 22nd centuries. Now with products, technology and marketing -- what Alibaba has done is a great combination of all three.

Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba ($BABA) is expected to begin an eagerly awaited roadshow for what could be the largest ever IPO early in the week of September 8, and its shares could list as soon as September 18 or 19, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Expected to raise about $20bn when it lists on the NYSE rivaling the Agricultural Bank of China’s $22.1bn IPO from July 2010, currently the largest on record.

Alibaba’s ability to make a transition to mobile has been a focus of analysts and investors as China’s tech groups square off for customers glued to smartphones. Last week, the company announced a surge in mobile revenues for the second quarter.

A tenf

Is Amazon's cloud play becoming gloomy?  Amazon, specifically Amazon Web Service (AWS) is in an out war with for the cloud with Google, Microsoft, and many, many others and it doesn't look as though these pressures are going to ease up any time soon.  Indeed everyone has or is (late bloomers) is getting into the cloud and of course, cost savings by having your own data servers is quite the enticement.

A quick look at the facts.

AWS sales dipped this quarter as Amazon announced Thursday that for its second quarter that the category that includes AWS saw a 3% sequential revenue slip. That “other” category — which also includes advertising services and co-branded credit card agreements — also logged 38% growth year over year which sounds fantastic until you realize year-over-year growth in the first quarter was 60%. There have been other slight quarterly dips in the category’s otherwise relentless rise over the past few years, but they’ve mostly happened between fourth and first quarters.

At its E3 press conference, Sony just announced that the PlayStation TV game console (known as the PlayStation Vita TV abroad) is coming to the United States and Canada this fall.

The PlayStation TV will come by itself for $99 (you’ll have to bring your own controller) or in a $139 bundle that comes with a DualShock Controller, a memory card to store downloaded games on, and a copy of the Lego Movie video game.

The console will be compatible with many of the games currently available on the PlayStation Vita, Sony’s portable game console. Those will be for available for download on the PlayStation store.

PlayStation TV owners will also be able to log in to PlayStation Now, Sony’s upcoming Netflix-like service that lets people “stream” games from the cloud. The service will have approximately 100 PlayStation 3 titles available as well as more than 20 free games made specifically for PlayStation Now.

Gamers with a PlayStation 4 in their home will also have the ability to stream games fro

This comparison chart from Quartz speaks volumes.  We knew brick and mortar was dying a slow death but man...........

(click image to enlarge)