New statistics have indicated that online sales are slowing, and this has worried some people. Yet “slow growth” is still growth, and – some projections accompanied those stats – even if 25 percent per year (in 2004) was great, nine percent (in 2010) won’t be too shabby.
An article in The New York Times represents the more pessimistic view, and data from companies like Forrester Research and Jupiter Research is brought to bear. “Forrester says that sales growth is pulling back in 18 of the 24 categories it measures,” one sentence states.
Dell, Best Buy, Apple, Amazon, and even Starbucks are then named as companies that have had to work around the slowdown.
Yet Techdirt’s Mike Masnick sees the issue in a different light. “That’s to be expected of any market once it goes mainstream, because you simply cannot maintain the same growth rate on such a large base,” he notes. “You hit diminishing returns. . . . [I]f the best they can do is to say that growth rates are hitting their expected diminishing returns, it hardly seems like a real problem.”
So should the owners of online businesses, big or small, be concerned? Probably not. The market may be getting more competitive, but it’s not yet crashing in on itself. This slowing growth could even be interpreted a positive thing – the last bubble that formed did a lot of damage when it burst.
