Adoption

There was a super popular chart in 2020 and 2021 that showed the trend line of ecommerce adoption in the US.

If you’re not so desensitized to it at this point, I’d like to spend a minute reframing that chart. As a refresher, it looked like this:

At the time this was most popular, everyone first talked about how COVID accelerated our ecommerce-first future and, then, after that failed to sustain, talked about how we all obviously misread the market.

Since then? The trend has mostly returned to its pre-COVID trajectory, proving that while technology continues to accelerate and infiltrate consumer consciousness, it usually takes a lot longer than industry analysts predict for consumers to really flip their behaviors (old habits die hard … or something like that).

I wonder, then, how much of ecommerce (or, maybe more specifically, which part of ecommerce) is really at risk of being disrupted in the near term.

If you think about ChatGPT (and other consumer LLMs), the best comp to them in terms of improving consumer access to ecommerce is probably the smartphone. So, I asked ChatGPT’s o3 model to build me a similar chart to the FRED chart above, except this one is smartphone share of US ecommerce sales.

That chart looks like this:

You could overlay these charts, and you could even build another chart, showing smartphone’s impact on retail sales overall, but you likely get the picture: What’s interesting to me about this is that the slope of ecommerce’s share of total retail sales roughly maps to the slope of the smartphone as an ecommerce tool.

Smartphones, then, didn’t just eat ecommerce sales; they created more ecommerce sales, and more consumer spending overall. While total retail sales (ecommerce + brick-and-mortar) have roughly doubled from 2010 to 2025, ecommerce sales have nearly 8x’d in that same timeframe.

I know I talked about this a little bit a few weeks ago, but I think it’s worth revisiting, because building a view on it yourself will help you prepare your business for whatever comes.

My “hot take,” if you will, is that DTC won’t be impacted too much in the near term by consumer LLMs like ChatGPT. It will take awhile for consumers to catch up to the technology and bake it into their purchasing behaviors.

Consumer adoption curves, of course, have accelerated over time. And it’s likely that adoption of LLMs will be faster than smartphones. Still, I’d guess that’s likely 5 years out—at least. But when that happens?

I expect these charts to look wildly, wildly different—and in a good way.