Seasonally adjusted online retail sales across Australia hit $3.99 billion in January 2024, up $58.2 million, according to new data by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
This is the highest it has been since late 2021, after online sales peaked at $4.3 billion in September that year and slipped to $4.03 billion a month later.
The online sales lift between December 2023 to January 2024 matches a similar lift in the same period last year. However, online sales slipped by $140 million between January and February 2023.
The overall level of online sales now is double the level reported in January 2020, when it was $1.83 billion.
The seasonally adjusted lift in online retail sales was driven by a $76.9 million lift in non-food retailing. Non-food includes apparel, footwear and accessories, which recorded the largest rise in overall sales for January 2024 across both online and in-store.
In original terms, the proportion of online food retailing sales to total food retailing rose from 5.7 per cent to 5.8 per cent, while the proportion for online non-food retailing sales to total non-food retailing rose from 15.7 per cent to 16.6 per cent. This was similar to last year where the proportion of online non-food retailing recovered to 16.7 per cent in January 2023, following a fall in December after Black Friday sales.
In original terms, the proportion of online sales to total retailing remained unchanged at 10.6 per cent in January 2024.
Meanwhile, original online sales for January 2024 were $3.6 billion, down by just over $1 billion compared to December - a 21.5 per cent drop.
Original sales peaked in November 2023 at $4.92 billion.
According to the ABS, an original time series shows the actual movements in the data over time. An original series includes any movements due to cyclical, seasonal and irregular events.
Seasonally adjusted series involves estimating and removing the cyclical and seasonal effects from the original data. Seasonally adjusting a time series is useful to understand the underlying patterns of change or movement in a population, without the impact of the seasonal or cyclical effects, ABS reported.
“For example, employment and unemployment are often seasonally adjusted so that the actual change in employment and unemployment levels can be seen, without the impact of periods of peak employment such as Christmas/New Year when a large number of casual workers are temporarily employed.”