E-commerce is big business. In 2018, in the US alone, 14.3% of total retail sales were made online. A total of $517.36 billion was spent with US online merchants, up 15.0% from the $449.88 billion spent in 2017.
For decades, there were just a handful of primary payment experiences. However, in recent years payment methods have expanded and diverged. Now, businesses have an average of five gateway processors and an average of four acquiring banks.
With E-commerce poised to grow into a whopping $4.8 trillion industry by 2021, this is certainly a fast-growing and lucrative industry. It’s also an industry dominated by Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN). Approximately 38% of all online sales occurring in the US, happen on the Amazon website. Yet Amazon’s dominance does not mean that other businesses and verticals are not benefitting from the growth in e-commerce. Here are two e-commerce stocks to keep an eye on for the rest of 2019:
Paypal (NASDAQ: PYPL)
Paypal is one of the leading payment platforms in the US and is a payment provider enjoying the rise in e-commerce. The number of websites that accept Paypal is increasing year-on-year, whilst total payment volume (TPV) rose by 22% to $161 billion from the previous year.
Paypal also owns Venmo, the popular peer-to-peer payment app which accounted for $21 billion of Paypal’s total payment volume, an increase of 73% from the year before.
Current Paypal (NASDAQ: PYPL) Price: $114
Shopify (NYSE: SHOP)
Shopify the Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa has established itself as a formidable force in the e-commerce world. It has over 800,000 merchants and growing all the time. Sales leapt 50% in the first quarter of 2019, but more impressive is the fact that the company are using innovation to grow. Shopify recently pledged a $1 billion investment in a new fulfilment service which should only improve the customer experience.
Current Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) Price: $1.89