Online shopping increases 22%
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Online retail sales increased 22% over the past year, the highest rate of increase for over two years.
The latest IMRG Capgemini e-retail Sales Index results revealed online sales saw a total spend of £4.5bn in May, an equivalent of £73 for every person in the UK.
According to the report, online shopping increased by 3% compared with April this year, with many online retail categories impacted by the World Cup.
Alcohol sales jumped 23% in May, and electrical goods by 13%, as people sought to upgrade their TVs ahead of the tournament. Clothing also rose by 32% over the past year, boosted by sales of sportswear.
Tina Spooner, director of information at IMRG, said, “Year to date, the UK e-retail market has grown 14%, which is in line with our predictions for this year. With recent research suggesting that over half of consumers believe the economy is now recovering from the recession, it is evident that e-retailers have already started to benefit from an increase in consumer spending.”
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Readers' comments (3)
Steve Abbott | Mon, 21 Jun 2010 5:11 pm
The May figures from The British Population Survey show that the number of people shopping on line was up in the 3 months to May 2010 to 51.4% of the population (24.7Million). This equates to 66.8% of the people who have internet access using it to shop on line.
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Mark Simpson | Fri, 25 Jun 2010 5:13 pm
As the demand for online shopping increases e-business owners must ensure they are continuing to meet customer expectations. With only about seven seconds to capture the attention of an online visitor and engage their interest, it is imperative that companies join up their customer data across all of their channels, so that branch staff know what customers have been doing online, and web pages work as an extension of interactions that may have begun elsewhere.
Many e-commerce businesses have spent vast fortunes honing and tweaking their web sites yet it is often the smallest and least obvious details that make the difference between conversion and abandonment.
Amazon has known this from the start, and has practised live, iterative site development from the beginning, continually testing and refining the messaging on its free delivery, secure payments and ‘go to checkout’ buttons, and perfecting the way it segments and targets its customers.
Many other online businesses, by contrast, continue to follow gut-feel, spurious ‘best practices’ or, at best, reactive feedback from small research samples. Alternatively, they may spend large sums of money on retrospective site activity analysis, which is then fed into a protracted redesign lifecycle, where the web site is completely, yet somewhat randomly, overhauled every couple of years.
Ultimately, it should be the customers themselves who design your web site, based on the live choices they make on your pages. A truly personalised web experience will be one which offers customers web page layouts, sequences and content that have been dynamically put together based on that user’s demonstrated preferences.
The average uplift in conversion following regular testing and small iterative improvements has shown itself to be in the region of 34-35%, which could have a huge impact on a company’s bottom line.
Mark Simpson
Founder and President
Maxymiser
www.maxymiser.com
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Emma Cunningham - Shopzilla UK Publisher Program | Thu, 8 Jul 2010 9:49 am
As an online comparison site with its own affiliate program, we have seen our traffic and affiliate numbers increase substantially as more and more people want to promote online.
The online world can only grow in the face of the recession as savvy shoppers turn to the internet in their hunt for lower prices and cheaper deals.
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