The ecommerce stack of US retail
248.ai, September 2026

Sample: 500 US retail stores drawn at random from a list of about 23,000
independent and mid-market stores.

For each store, Ora checked whether it is still open, whether it has its own
website, whether that website sells merchandise online, and which ecommerce
platform runs it. On September 28, 2026 every open store with a website was
checked again by hand, page by page. Each verdict carries the page that proves
it and a plain-English reason.

"Sells online" means the store's own site, or its parent brand's site, has a
working cart and checkout for merchandise with prices. These do not count:
gift-card-only, classes or bookings only, quote or call-for-price only,
catalogs without prices, login-only wholesale portals, marketplace-only
listings, password-locked or empty shops, and dead sites.

Files
- funnel_summary.csv: step, stores, share_of_500, share_of_previous_step
  (10 rows: open, closed, different business, website, sells online)
- ecommerce_platforms.csv: platform, stores, share_of_stores_selling_online
  (34 rows, one per platform, 136 stores in total; "Custom" is an in-house
  build)
- by_category.csv: category, sampled, open, open_with_website, sells_online
  (11 rows)
- store_evidence.csv: store, category, city, state, website, sells_online,
  ecommerce_platform, evidence_url, why
  (264 rows, one per open store with a website: 136 yes, 127 no, 1 could
  not be loaded). evidence_url is the page that proves the verdict; why says
  what is on that page and what it means.

Headline numbers
- Open 368 (73.6%), closed 103 (20.6%), different business at the address 29 (5.8%)
- Open with a website 264 (52.8%)
- Open, website, sells online 136 (27.2%; 51.5% of open stores with a website)
- Shopify 37, custom builds 18, WooCommerce 14, Salesforce Commerce Cloud 8

Pages were checked September 28, 2026. Sites change; a link may have moved
since.

Contact: https://calendly.com/mert-248/15-minutes
