Can a Click Beat a Storefront? What Online Retail Means for the Grand Strand’s Beachwear and Surf Shop Chains

Posted Wednesday, September 30, 2026 2:40 pm

David Hucks (via MyrtleBeachSC)

A modern online store will not empty the Grand Strand’s beachwear shops, but it will sort them. The chains that tie their registers, stockrooms and websites together stand to win back customers they lose the moment a vacation ends. The ones that don’t will keep competing on the same crowded stretch of Kings Highway for a shrinking share of each tourist dollar.

Anyone who has driven Business 17 knows the landscape. The pastel Grand Strand’s beachwear shops, the fake surfboards on the facade, the banner planes promising cheap T-shirts. For decades that model worked because the product was sold where the customer was standing. The question for 2026 is what happens when the customer can buy the same towel, hat or souvenir mug from a phone in Ohio in February.

This piece pulls together local reporting, federal retail data and tourism figures to answer that question for Horry County residents, who have a stake in these stores as shoppers, employees, neighbors and taxpayers.

Built for foot traffic

The Grand Strand’s beachwear business was designed around one thing: a visitor walking past the door. A former Myrtle Beach city councilman told The Post and Courier that the trade runs on impulse, with shoppers stopping at whichever store happens to be in front of them [The Post and Courier, 2018]. That same report described blocks where several stores sit side by side, sometimes all under one chain’s name.

That density was not an accident. Isaac Shamah, who ran nine Pacific Beachwear locations at the time, explained that rising costs for utilities, shipping, merchandise and property taxes squeezed margins so hard that it could take five stores to earn what one used to [The Post and Courier, 2018]. Once a chain is already paying for a warehouse and a delivery driver, the logic goes, adding another storefront spreads those fixed costs further.

The same reporting flagged a deeper problem. When the shops first boomed in the 1980s, visitors could not find these goods anywhere else. Today, Shamah noted, distributors sell to everyone, and even drugstores stock sand toys and beach chairs [The Post and Courier, 2018]. In other words, the chains were already losing their exclusivity to big-box retail years before online shopping became the bigger threat.

Some of the larger players saw the web coming. Eagles Beachwear, which traces its start to 1981 in Myrtle Beach, runs an online store and told the Myrtle Beach Herald it planned to improve that store and grow its digital presence [Myrtle Beach Herald, 2022]. A gift-card listing for the chain describes more than 20 area locations and pitches its website as a way to reach shoppers beyond the beach [Giftly, n.d.]. Having a website, however, is not the same thing as running a connected, data-driven store.

That distinction matters more every quarter, as the national numbers show.

The online shift, by the numbers

Online sales are growing fast, but physical stores still take most of the money. The U.S. Census Bureau reported $340.2 billion in e-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2026, up 12.2% from a year earlier and equal to 17.1% of all retail [U.S. Census Bureau, 2026]. Put the other way, roughly 83 cents of every retail dollar is still spent offline [Webtonic, 2026].

Ron Jon has stores at Barefoot Landing and Broadway at the Beach. The company offers online sales through Shopify-like merchandising. In coverage of founder Ron DiMenna’s death last September, a company spokesman said annual sales at the 12 Ron Jon stores exceed $50 million. This includes store sales and online sales.

For Grand Strand shops, two trends inside those numbers stand out:

Online is growing about twice as fast. Total retail rose 6.7% year over year in that quarter, less than half the online growth rate [Webtonic, 2026].
Phones drive the purchase. Mobile accounted for 44.6% of U.S. e-commerce in 2025, and Amazon alone was projected to capture about 40% of online sales [Webtonic, 2026, citing eMarketer].

The local customer base is also under pressure. Visit Myrtle Beach reported 18.2 million visitors and $13.2 billion in direct visitor spending in 2024 [Visit Myrtle Beach, 2025]. But area tourism slipped about 3% in 2025, with officials pointing to weather, economic strain and negative social media [WMBF News, 2026]. City leaders also cited inflation and higher prices as a drag on occupancy [Spectrum News, 2026].

The takeaway for beachwear owners is uncomfortable. A business model that depends on bodies walking down Ocean Boulevard is exposed when fewer bodies arrive, and the customers who do arrive are carrying a store in their pocket. That is the gap a platform like Shopify is built to fill.

What a Shopify-style store actually changes

The real shift is not “having a website.” It is running the stores and the website as one business. Shopify markets its point-of-sale system as a single back office for in-person and online sales, with inventory that updates across every channel in real time [Shopify, 2020]. When the company relaunched that system, it said merchants who connected online and in-store sales saw revenue rise 30% year over year, helped by buy-online, pick-up-in-store and local delivery [Shopify, 2020]. That figure comes from the vendor itself and should be read as a sales pitch, not an independent study.

Still, the features map neatly onto problems specific to the Grand Strand:

The off-season. A family that bought matching shirts in July can reorder in December, or buy a gift for someone who never made the trip. That turns a one-week customer into a year-round one.
The store down the street. Shopify promotes “endless aisle” selling, where a clerk can close a sale on an out-of-stock item and ship it from another location [Shopify, n.d.]. For a chain with 20 stores, that means a sold-out size at one shop no longer sends the customer next door to a competitor.
The warehouse. Shamah’s point about fixed costs cuts both ways. Chains that already pay for a warehouse and a driver have the fulfillment backbone a web store needs, so shipping online orders is a smaller leap for them than for a single shop.
Rain days. With 2025’s wet July cited as one reason for lower occupancy [Spectrum News, 2026], a visitor stuck in a condo is a customer who can browse and order for pickup.

This is the core of the analysis: online tools do not threaten the big chains so much as reward scale. The operators with the most stores, the deepest inventory and an existing warehouse are best placed to use them. Small independents face the same technology at the same monthly price but with fewer ways to fill orders.

That advantage, though, only goes so far.

The risks the chains can’t code around

A website cannot fix a product problem. The beachwear shops’ core stock, meaning towels, flip-flops, chairs and generic tees, is exactly what Amazon, Walmart and Target already sell online at scale. The Post and Courier’s reporting that shelves across retail have become a blend of identical goods [The Post and Courier, 2018] is even more true on the web, where the cheapest listing is one search away. A chain that simply posts its store inventory online will be competing on price against companies with far larger shipping networks.

What the chains do own is place. A shirt that says “Myrtle Beach” or “Garden City” carries meaning a generic one does not. The local operators who treat the online store as a souvenir and memory business, not a discount towel business, are the ones with something a national retailer cannot copy.

There is also a local policy angle residents should watch. Myrtle Beach has a history of regulating what these stores sell. The city’s Ocean Boulevard Entertainment Overlay District barred smoke shops and tobacco sales from the downtown core, and the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld that ordinance in a case brought partly by beachwear retailers, including the operator of Pacific Beachwear [Ani Creation v. City of Myrtle Beach, 2023]. When the overlay took effect, a longtime store owner said it left some of his storefronts empty and his workers without jobs [WBTW, n.d.].

That history raises a fair question: zoning controls what a storefront displays on Ocean Boulevard, but it does not reach a website. If chains shift more of their sales online, some of the city’s leverage over the downtown retail mix could quietly shrink. Conversely, empty or underused storefronts are a real risk to the look and tax base of a tourist district if online sales let chains close marginal locations.

Finally, there are jobs. Eagles has advertised seasonal and year-round positions [Myrtle Beach Herald, 2022], and chains like it employ many local workers. A connected store may shift some of that labor from the sales floor to picking, packing and shipping rather than eliminate it, but the mix of jobs would likely change.

Conclusion

So, will a dynamic Shopify-style store affect the Grand Strand’s beachwear and surf shop chains? Yes, but unevenly. The evidence points to three likely outcomes:

Big chains gain ground. Operators with many stores and an existing warehouse can turn their footprint into a fulfillment network and sell to visitors long after checkout.
Generic stock stays exposed. Towels and chairs sold online will lose to national retailers on price. Location-branded goods are the chains’ real online edge.
The strip could thin out. If online sales let chains close weaker storefronts, residents may see fewer shops on the same block, which could be good for the corridor’s look or bad for its vacancy rate.

The beachwear store is one of the most recognizable parts of the Myrtle Beach experience. What happens to it online will say a lot about whether the Grand Strand’s tourist economy can keep visitors spending after they drive home on U.S. 501.