E-Commerce Is 20% of Retail – the Other 80% Is Still Up for Grabs

01 /The Concept

Leap helps brands open physical retail stores that sell more than the average store – while carrying less risk than opening a store the traditional way.

The key angle: Leap's target audience is existing e-commerce brands that want to add a physical retail channel to grow their sales. The process starts by connecting a Shopify store to the Leap platform, after which Leap's AI analyzes the product catalog and recommends optimal locations for a physical store.

To surface those recommendations, Leap's AI draws on retail market data, foot traffic composition in different locations, and sales data from the 100+ stores it currently operates – through which 175 merchants sell to more than 120,000 shoppers per month.

Once a location is selected, Leap designs the store and produces a renovation budget. After the merchant signs off, Leap handles the build-out and installs all necessary retail fixtures.

The work doesn't stop at opening day. While the renovation is underway, Leap recruits and trains the store's staff. After launch, it manages the store on an ongoing basis – monitoring daily operations, optimizing product placement, tracking inventory, and handling accounting.

If the first store performs well, the merchant can open additional locations through Leap in other cities. Leap currently has spaces in 12 US cities.

The critical structural point: Leap signs long-term leases directly with landlords, in its own name, and then opens stores for its merchant clients within those spaces. The merchant has no direct obligation to the landlord. On top of that, Leap covers 75% of the cost of fitting out a new store.

The net effect: an e-commerce brand can open a physical location in something like MVP mode – test whether offline materially boosts sales (both in-store and online) before committing further.

Leap's data supports the case: opening a physical location brings in an average of 90% new customers who had never visited the brand's website, and a single store can lift total revenue by at least 10%.

For landlords, the model also removes a nagging risk: they're no longer worried their tenant will close and leave them searching for a replacement. Leap is the tenant – and Leap is the one who loses money on idle space, so it has every incentive to keep filling it.

Leap earns a fixed fee based on store square footage plus a percentage of in-store sales.

The company just raised $20M. It had previously raised $15M in the summer of 2023, [covered here](/review/vlez-v-prodazhi-togo-chto-uzhe-horosho-prodajotsja-100-zarabotaesh). One wrinkle: the number of stores Leap operates hasn't grown meaningfully since that last round. Total funding to date stands at $109.5M.

02 /Why It Matters

Leap isn't an agent, a broker, or a contractor. It's a platform – one that lets brands spin up physical retail the same way Shopify let them spin up online stores. Which makes it particularly clever that Leap's primary target market is brands that built on Shopify: those founders already understand the value of a platform that handles the operational complexity so they can focus on selling.

This might look like a step backward. It isn't. A recent Forrester study estimates that US offline retail will reach $4.2 trillion by 2028. Government data for 2023 already showed in-store retail at over $7 trillion against just $1.24 trillion in e-commerce – meaning online accounts for only about 15% of all retail sales, despite all the hype.

European numbers are similar: e-commerce was 15.3% of total retail in 2023, forecast to reach only 20.4% by 2028.

Even among the youngest consumers, offline remains dominant. Among Gen Z specifically, 37% prefer buying in-store first versus 28% who prefer online, with 36% doing both equally. Physical retail is nowhere near dead.

03 /Opportunities

Here's the pattern worth paying attention to: a new generation of entrepreneurs knows e-commerce better than they know physical retail. For them, opening an online store is easy; opening a physical one is intimidating and opaque. The situation is almost exactly the inverse of what existed when Shopify launched.

Back then, everyone understood how to run a physical store, but almost nobody knew how to sell online. Shopify removed that barrier – and doing so was worth billions. Now everyone can sell online, but most people don't know how to open a physical location. So a platform that makes physical retail as easy as setting up a Shopify store has genuine value. That's what Leap is building.

The broader opportunity: platform solutions for entrepreneurs who want to start or expand an offline business, without the traditional operational overhead.

Leap's model is one approach, but not the only one.

Moxie ([related review](/review/iz-it-v-offlajn-a-pochemu-net)) helps aspiring entrepreneurs open beauty salons – handling location scouting, equipment procurement, owner and staff training, salon management software, supply purchasing, bookkeeping, and ongoing consulting. In exchange, it takes a percentage of revenue. Salons on the Moxie platform grow revenue and profit roughly twice as fast as those going it alone. Since 2022, 300 salons have opened on the platform, and Moxie has raised $25.7M.

Interestingly, Moxie's founder previously built Thinkful, an online coding education platform, which he sold to Chegg in 2019 for $100M – and then moved into physical retail. That arc confirms the transition from online to offline is genuinely viable, even for people who've done well on the internet.

Beauty salons, fitness studios, specialty food, children's education – any local-service category where a new operator benefits from a plug-in playbook, shared infrastructure, and a revenue-share model rather than a traditional lease is a candidate. The entry angle is finding a vertical where franchise fees are high, brand recognition is low, and the operational know-how is genuinely transferable.