michelle romano is the clear bank co-founder she's joining us from toronto canada good to see you again um it's really it it i guess it's to be expected as we all have started or eight months ago nine months ago buying online in ways we hadn't before there's really nothing that's going to stop this juggernaut is there a point is it too soon to say when e-commerce may actually surpass brick and mortar it's still there's still quite a gap to close yeah so you know if you've if you zoom out and look at where we are
today i mean e-commerce sales the percentage of retail sales went from 14 of retail sales at the beginning of cove to almost 30 today so there is that path where we could completely see this getting to half of retail sales as we've gone back into lockdown we've seen this and i think what's really interesting on this black friday we actually saw a lot of small businesses win for the first time so you know clearbank's the largest ecommerce investor we have 20 000 companies connected um in um to us and when we look at the companies
that are doing less than 30k so really those are these new early small businesses those this friday this black friday were up about 150 so i think that's really good news is this message about shopping local but just doing it online is really getting out there michelle when we talk about accelerating trends here we talked about the time and time again not only with retail but really across all sectors when it comes to covet and the changes that it has prompted over just 10 months how when you talk about 14 of e-commerce sales accounting for
all of retail back in march and now it's now it's close to 30 percent how quickly did we grow i mean was that something that would have taken three years five years did we see 10 years of growth in just 10 months we saw 10 years of growth internally as a team we're talking about we're not in e-commerce 2020 we are in e-commerce 2030 right now because this was very slow people were changing consumer behaviors very slowly you think about folks like my mother who were scared to buy their groceries online because the blueberries would
be crushed well covent came and she bought her blueberries online they were just fine and you know she changed a shopping habit permanently and so i think that's why we're going to see a lot of these secular changes as we've gotten more comfortable with the categories that we wanted online we also saw new categories open up that i thought were surprising i mean the big ones that were up in our portfolio no surprise here medical supplies collectibles people were looking for nostalgia and hobbies and then the last one that really served this year was cbd
cbd we're still we're debating in the united states whether we're going to legalize marijuana that there could be a vote in the house on that this week but i want to get back to this growth because you talk about the monthly revenues and clearbank yeah you truly saw some incredible growth give us some of the numbers and even though we're not going to go backwards that kind of growth it's not really sustainable once we really do get out of the pandemic or is it you know it's it is really hard um to see i think
that we've actually changed a lot of these patterns i don't think we'll keep seeing you know um we'll not see next year 30 to 40 of retail sales being e-commerce this is probably going to slow down a little bit but the reality is is that ecommerce is getting better and better at anticipating our habits giving us you know easy ways for things to arrive at our door without us doing much thinking or much work there is a lot of things on subscription now which are really helping consumers you know do less things in their lives
and so i think we could anticipate that this could uh that this could still keep growing quite substantially depending on on how fast you know we get back to normal um you know and and it's going to be interesting to see how next year is going to play out michelle when people change the way that they shop it obviously has an impact then on advertising how to what degree has this changed the advertising landscape and how well this is really interesting so you know one of the ways that most of these you know small independent
e-commerce stores largely the ones that we back have grown our facebook and google ads and facebook was really the dominant platform for so long for so much discovery but this black friday we actually saw facebook was down almost nine percent and google was up over 52 and so i think there's probably you know this is pretty fascinating to me this is not a trend i would have expected but i think there's a few things i think facebook was very aggressive before um the election with you know limiting all sorts of ads and so there's a
lot of advertisers that were cut off or their accounts were suspended so they actually couldn't spend the same way the second thing is now that people are spending so much more time online google's very good at following you around the internet so as you're looking for other things they're putting those nice little you know pop-ups being like remember you clicked on this a few days ago maybe you still want it and the last thing is that you know this has been the year of tick-tock um people have really changed um their social media and have
added a new platform which is giving you know these small brands a whole new way to reach especially um these young gen z customers you talk about young gen z but we'll really have jumped the shark when your mother and my mother are doing tick tock then we're talking i gotta say thank you so much for being here michelle romanow clearbank co-founder good to see you once again stay healthy and be well
