Online sales accounted for a record share of South Korea's total retail sales last month, as summer heat and the vacation season boosted demand for online orders. Offline, major channels including hypermarkets and super supermarkets (SSMs) continued to slump, widening their sales gap with online retailers.
Online sales rose 8.5% from a year earlier in July, according to the July sales trends of major retailers released by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) on the 26th. Online accounted for 60.8% of total retail sales, surpassing the 60.6% recorded in March this year to set a new record high.
Summer heat and vacation-season demand drove the increase in online sales. Sales in the services and other category, which includes delivery services and travel and cultural products, jumped 17.5% from a year earlier. Continued demand for online grocery shopping lifted food sales by 10.4%, while strong sales of cooling appliances helped the home appliance segment grow 11.4%.
Offline, performance varied sharply by channel. Department store sales rose 17.9% from a year earlier, extending strong growth. A recovery in domestic consumer sentiment, rising demand from foreign shoppers and the vacation-season boost combined to produce even gains across all categories, including luxury goods, vacation items and cooling appliances.
Convenience store sales rose 1.1% from a year earlier, continuing their upward trend. Amid the heat, the number of transactions fell 0.5%, but the average spending per transaction rose 1.6%. Department stores and convenience stores have posted growth for 13 consecutive months since July of last year.
Hypermarkets and super supermarkets (SSMs), by contrast, continued to struggle. Hypermarket sales fell 11.2%, marking a fifth straight month of negative growth. Homeplus, which began a temporary closure from July 13, was excluded from this tally. SSM sales also fell 2.9%, declining for an eighth consecutive month. Still, the drop in food sales, their core segment, narrowed to 2.5% in July from 10.6% in June.
Meanwhile, the number of convenience stores stood at 53,458 as of last month, up 192 from 53,266 at the end of last year.
