Christmas shopping lives up to the hype

Yes it looks like the major online & multi-channel retailers had another good Christmas, here are some highlights:

Marks & Spencer online sales  grew 32% in the 13 weeks to 26th December. The retailer hailed Christmas trading a success after posting a 0.8% like-for-like sales growth over the festive period but warned that trading conditions during 2010 will remain challenging. The retailer reported a 1.2% comparable sales rise in general merchandise and food sales advanced 0.4% in fourth quarter of 2009.

John Lewis online  Clearance sales were up 23% in its first three days. The retailer experienced its busiest ever hour online when it launched the online Clearance at 6pm on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day online shoppers made a purchase every 10 seconds, but the volume of sales dropped between 1pm and 4pm as people enjoyed their Christmas lunch. On Boxing Day the retailer saw a record number of visitors to the web site, peaking between 11am and midday.

Amazon said that it had a busy Christmas with 2 million orders delivered on its busiest day which was December 7. At its peak it said it was shipping over 1.2m units in just 24 hours.

Christmas 2009 online spending

Here is a quick round up on Christmas Eve of stats for online spending so far this Christmas (2009)…

According to Hitwise – peak online spending days (UK)

• Cyber Monday’ (Dec 7) and Sunday December 6 were the joint busiest days for online retailers so far this year, meaning that the peak for Christmas online shopping has moved closer to the 25th. The busiest day for online retailers in 2008 was Sunday November 30.
• Department stores and supermarkets have been the biggest beneficiaries of the shift towards later online shopping this Christmas, though Amazon had the biggest increase in visits.
• According to MetaPack stats, Cyber Monday remains the highest shopping day in the UK with sales on Monday 14 decreasing by 2% on the 7th.
• On December 7, £1.4m was spent online at 13:43 in just one minute, with sales peaking at £33m between 13:00 and 14:00. (IMRG)

Average (UK) order size / value according to Coremetrics

• Coremetrics figures show that  the value of the average order placed online is up by 94% this Christmas, compared to 2008.
• The number of goods that are purchased per transaction has also increased significantly, from 2.7 items in 2007 to 3.7 per order in 2009.

Last year the big surprise was a big online spending day on Christmas Day – let’s see what happens this time!

Cyber Monday – first Monday of December again

I had a little side bet going and it looks like I will be ‘in pocket’…

Monday 7th December appears to have been this years Cyber Monday (Mega Monday in the US) – I will watch out for data to back this up and report ASAP

Online sales surge for christmas

We can expect another record for online sales this christmas – with Monday 8th December tipped to be the biggest day – expected to be up 15% on last year.

On the biggest day of christmas shopping online £320m is expected to be spent. Peak shopping time will be between 1pm and 2pm when shoppers are expected to spend £28m. This is double the amount spent by shoppers at last year’s peak christmas shopping hour, at midday on Monday December 11.

Online spending for the final quarter is expected to hit £13.16 billion and this year the big trend is hard-up shoppers on the search for bargains on the web. Total average online spend per person will be £215 and although this is a growth of 15%, it is slower than the rate of growth in 2007 when final quarter online sales jumped 54% on 2006.

 Figures will be avialable from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index

Agility; rapidly adapting to change

From a series of interviews by CVL – with senior execs from Allianz to News International and from Barclays to O2 – the summary is that ‘agile service development’ is all about getting the right product to market faster.

The aim of the survey was to find out how UK business is adopting and implementing smarter ways of getting new services to market. the conclusion was that ‘agility creates both immediate and lasting benefits to business bringing new products to market’.

- agile approaches are difficult to implement but worth the effort as they improve success rates, reduce risk & lead to better quality in a shorter time

- overall efficiency has been improved by those who have made the change, with quality assurance being introduced earlier in the process

Download the report here

£84m spent online on Christmas Day

I said back in December we were staying home to do our Christmas shopping, but even so, the biggest e-commerce surprise of the year was Christmas Day and Boxing Day; 4.4 million people actually bought things online on Christmas Day, spending £84million, this on a day when the shops are supposed to be closed!!!!

Generally UK retailers have seen their online sales grow about 30% Year on Year (YoY)
- Argos MCR revenues up 33% YoY
- M&S web sales up 78%, even though overall down 2.2%
- Sainsbury’s 40% growth in last quarter, up 50% to 100,000 orders in run up to Christmas
- Amazon UK peaked on 10th December, selling 1 million products in a day, that’s 11 orders per second
-Tesco Direct (non-food) did £190m in the last quarter of 2008. Food did 2m orders in the last 12 weeks of the year.
- Interestingly, Domino’s are now doing >£1m a week online

USA reported similar performance, a Chase Group report says the online retail channel saw 29% growth in the last 10 weeks of the year.

Monetising social networks – easy to say, harder to do

A new warning just out – social networks may not drive online sales! You don’t say….

I was asked to talk about this area of online strategy at an LBS event a few weeks ago – the theme – monetizing social networks. There is a lot of interest in this right now and for good reason, we all want to make sure we are investing in stuff that will drive sales. This particular session was interesting, there were many bright individuals in the room and together we were able to highlight a few cool emerging businesses but we weren’t weighed down with examples of big brands leveraging social networks to drive online sales.

Now I see that Forrester are offering up a note of caution, claiming social networks have been considered more effective for brand-building and less proven for driving revenue or sales conversion. They say that retailers therfore need to continue investments in proven techniques like e-mail marketing and free shipping promotions to drive sales.

Well yes that’s a safe conclusion to draw because it’s a classic case of “get the basics right before adding the frills”. But it’s a big generalisation and we should all be working on improving the basics everyday anyway – I think it’s still important for anyone who owns online strategy for a retail brand to be thinking about how their customers might benefit from well thought through innovations and in some cases that will draw on social networks or on offering interaction that fits the customers mission.

This story summarising recent research with retailers in the US about their plans for online spend in 2008 suggests most aren’t thinking any further than placing ads on social network sites. I do hope some of the bright sparks in retail are thinking abit more ambitiously than this…please say yes.

BTW – i almost forgot to mention the headline news of this research from Forrester and Shop.org – Retail online sales (US) are set to grow again to $204 billion in 2008 from $174.5 billion last year. This despite the recession! All I can say is some brands are going to have to work harder to maintain growth and that means challenging the assumptions and thinking futher ahead – online strategy designed to deliver something of value to your customers and within a multi-channel retail strategy.

Everywhere and nowhere baby, social networking for retailers

Online Retailers today are trying to figure out how to play in the Web 2.0 world – and the latest wave is Social Networking for Retailers. I don’t know what Jeff Beck was on when he wrote the lyrics for Hi Ho Silver Lining, but he created a big hit with these lyrics:

You’re everywhere and nowhere baby, thats where you’re at. Going down a bumpy hillside, in your hippy hat…and away you go now baby, I see your sun is shining. But I won’t make a fuss, though its obvious.

 

For me this surreally sums up the approach of some current online strategies – one of the fave raves right now is monetising social networks – I was invited to discuss this very thing just last week at LBS Technology Summit - Monetising Social Networks. And this week it also cropped up in The Economist.

At LBS I was on a panel with Alex Kwiatkowski of Datamonitor, Alix Taffle of Gumtree/eBay and Indira Thambia ex Argos for an interesting discussion about what is and isn’t happening with retailers to monetise social networks. A number of interesting examples and ideas were kicked around but there just wasn’t a feeling that any of the big boys is making it a major priority right now or that we’ve seen the next big thing yet. For most retailers it’s still an experiment, and today I heard about this (good hype value) initiative just announced by Sears and Facebook – Sears is kicking off a new prom-dress campaign that lets shoppers share their selections with friends on Facebook. The other interesting initiatives are coming from niche or specialist online players – I like this one for shoe lovers.

I’ll be keeping my eye on how this all unfolds, but I’m sure we won’t be calling it social networking for retailers in 3 years, and it certainly won’t be a business model as such – just another element in the proposition or experience for those that get it right – shall we call it Social Shopping?

Christmas is coming and we’re staying home to shop

Christmas is coming, I was out last night enjoying the christmas lights and eating turkey with all the trimmings. Whilst all that feels a bit early in mid November you can be sure the retailers are ready and whatever is happening on the high street there is certainly another big uplift in online sales.

According to the IMRG christmas statement 27 million of us will shop online during the festive season and we will spend £13.8 billion!

Elsewhere I read that despite all the recent headlines about house price concerns and trouble in the financial markets spending to date this Christmas is up 7% on this time last year. Apparently consumers expect to spend on average £706 per person compared with £662 in 2006 so there is little sign of cutting back.

The fact that we are doing our christmas shopping online isn’t surprising when you think about it. Very few homes are not online now and so many of us are plugged into broadband so it’s just so much more convenient to sort out our christmas list at home on the web. In fact that’s exactly what I did this morning in the comfort of home rather than the battle in town.

How will you shop this christmas? If you’re looking for inspiration, try the gift ideas generator www.giftgen.co.uk

And take a look at IMRG’s top 10 safe online shopping tips;
1. All of your usual shopping rights apply online: see www.consumer.gov.uk
2. Know who you’re dealing with: get the seller’s landline phone number and postal address
3. Be aware of terms and conditions: check payment and delivery details
4. Keep records of what you order
5. EU Law protects you against fraudulent use of your payment card in EU transactions: credit cards give you extra protection
6. Only give your payment card details over a secure connection, and never by email: never disclose your PIN number to anyone, and never send it over the internet
7. You usually have at least 7 days to cancel an order and request a refund from an EU retailer
8. Check your payment card statement carefully: you have at least 90 days to report a suspect transaction
9. When you buy goods online from outside the EU you are an importer and may be liable to pay any Customs Duty and VAT and you should err on the side of caution as it may be difficult to seek redress if problems arise
10. If you have a problem, contact the seller then, if you need to, the payment company, local Trading Standards Office and any ‘trustmark’ organisation the seller is registered with

MCR, the bricks and clicks revenge

When I wrote about the bricks and clicks revenge back in the 20th century, my view was that consumers would be looking at high street stores for an extension of their service across a range of channels and that some online only brands would struggle to compete with this multi-channel approach.

Some top British retail brands are living up to this potential with Argos and Tesco pushing ahead and an increasingly large pack following and looking for their own magic mix to take some of the advantage for themselves.

According to online retail research group IMRG, britons have spent more than £100bn online since 1995. Online sales for April ’07 rose 55 per cent, the largest rise since December ‘03 when Christmas shopping sent sales soaring. Retailers that embraced online sales early are reaping the benefits; Tesco is now the UK’s fourth largest internet retailer, with Tesco.com processing almost £1bn of grocery sales and generating profits of £56m. Only Amazon, Dell and Argos rank higher, with Argos easily transferring its catalogue shopping online to cash in on the boom. And John Lewis Direct reported good growth in the first quarter of the year, their Head of eCommerce, David Walmsley said online sales increased by 45 per cent in the period.

It’s not difficult to see why “bricks and mortar” retailers and catalogue companies are investing in the web and looking for ways to integrate all their customer channels. They are viewing the ROI of their web investments in a new light – total customer value. All the evidence is that customers who shop with a retailer in more than one channel are significantly more valuable, increasing their average spend by at least 50%. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the majority of consumers do their product research online before they purchase offline. This means that in-store, in-catalogue and online marketing and promotions need to be integrated to ensure best results.

So that’s what it says in the business cases being approved by the top retail boards, but what does integrated multi-channel retail mean to you?