Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Is Macy’s E-Commerce investment starting to pay off? With major chains repeatedly hitting disappointing in-store sales month after month, it would be easy to dismiss Macy’s online-doing-better-than-in-store numbers as temporary aberrations due more to the depressed in-store sales than anything else.

But new numbers just for May—showing Macy’s online hitting 12.2 percent sales increases, compared with a 9.1 percent drop for in-store, which is a massive 21.3 percent spread for that month’s $1.74 billion in revenue—make it hard to view those figures as anything other than powerful E-Commerce performance.

The new figures come to us courtesy of Internet Retailer, which makes a habit of crunching retail numbers and calculating their online sales even when they don’t break it out.

The publication reported that May was the continuation of a trend. Macy’s “web sales from January to May are up 15.2 percent, while total revenue for the period decreased 9.5 percent to $6.94 billion from $7.67 billion and year-to-date comparable-store sales have declined 9.1 percent. Macy’s attributes the growth in web sales to enhanced merchandising and marketing strategies the chain is implementing to retain more customers and generate bigger tickets,” Internet Retailer said.

“Last year, Macy’s began a pilot to install more web-enabled point-of-sale terminals in stores, increased the number of SKUs in its online inventory on Macys.com and Bloomingdales.com to more than 50,000, implemented customer reviews and rolled out a pilot for its Find It In Store program.”