Driven by growth of on-line orders, the warehouses and distribution centers play a key role in the supply chain and “same day” delivery by e-commerce giants require even more storage space

Central to fulfillment logistics, industrial REITs with warehouse capacity have been favored in 2018- 2019 by the investors projecting 50% growth of US retail e-commerce sales by 2022 

Amazon continues to dominate and relies mainly (but not exclusively) on its own warehouse facilities and robotics expertise, and on the warehouses of its suppliers. By raising customers' service-level expectations with high speed delivery, Amazon has in effect broadened the e-commerce segment of retail sales for all parties

The e-commerce share of retail depends on what is included in general retail - if restaurant & bar sales are included, the share drops to 8% (2017 figures) and with a narrow defintion of genral retail (mall category sales, focused on electronics & appliances, clothing and furniture), e-commerce share exceeded 26% (2017)

The standard reference is 'everything retail' except restaurants and bars - from approx. 9% in 2017, e-commerce' share grew to 11.2% at year end 2019 and - as a result of the pandemic - reached 16.1% (Q2-2020) and 14.3% (Q3-2020) - US Census Bureau 

2020 results of REITs have been disappointing - presumably because of slow demand on the industrial side and more intensive use of existing warehouse infrastructure by e-commerce specialists

The performance of key suppliers of warehouse automation such as conveyor belt- and storage/retrieval systems (Daifuku) or machine vision for inspection and code recognition systems (Keyrence) is testimony to the strength of the sector