The familiar retail story says the future belongs to the screen. The store is expensive, the internet is efficient, and every independent retailer should be trying to become an ecommerce company with a front door.

A new set of data points in a different direction. Not away from ecommerce, but away from the lazy idea that a physical shop is simply a slower version of a website.

Faire’s inaugural Independent Retail Report, published this week, examined a matched group of more than 130,000 independent retailers active on its wholesale marketplace in both the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026. Within that dataset, 59 percent of brick-and-mortar or multichannel retailers increased their wholesale purchasing. The typical physical or multichannel store increased spending by about 19 percent year over year, compared with 9 percent for the typical online-only store.

That does not mean physical retail is beating ecommerce everywhere. Faire measures buying through Faire, not each retailer’s full sales or all of its purchasing. The company says its sample leans toward gift, books, toys, home, apparel, and beauty. It is company-reported marketplace data, not a census of retail.

Still, the pattern deserves attention because it points to a more useful competitive advantage: curation with proximity.

Independent shops can see a local signal, order in small batches, and change course quickly. They do not need a national buying committee to decide whether a new product belongs on a shelf. Faire found its fastest growth outside major metros; in the United Kingdom, 90 percent of the retailers measured in Hereford and Lyme Regis grew, compared with 58 percent in London. It also found that retailers adding categories increased their spending, while the most discovery-oriented stores bought two to two-and-a-half times the gross merchandise value of an average active shop.

The point is not to fill every shelf with novelty. It is to make the shop useful in a way a generic online catalog cannot be. A good local retailer knows what a customer is likely to need this weekend, what visitors will take home, and which emerging product fits the neighborhood before a national chain has noticed it.

The report offers a striking example. Faire says purchases of “squishies” on its platform grew more than 400 percent in the second quarter after a TikTok trend began to spread. Small, frequent orders allow an independent to test that demand without making the same large inventory bet as a chain.

That should affect the numbers an owner watches. Revenue matters, but so do sell-through speed, the percentage of stock bought on repeat versus on discovery, and how often customers mention a product they first saw in the store. Those measures reveal whether curation is actually earning its keep or merely creating an attractive but expensive assortment.

That is the commercial lesson. The store is not winning because customers suddenly dislike online shopping. It wins when it turns local knowledge into a better selection, faster than a distant algorithm or a centralized buyer can manage.

For an owner, that suggests a sharper question than “Should we sell online?” Of course they should, where it helps customers buy. The better question is: what do people learn, discover, or decide in this shop that they cannot get from a search box? That is where a local retailer’s margin begins.