UK E Commerce Christmas Sales
Posted by | dgaddy | on | January 12, 2012 | Comments Off
About the Author David Gadd is CEO of ICO3 Ltd. He is a leading expert on E Commerce conversion rates and how to grow an E Commerce business. David Gadd
A wide range of articles about on-line Chistmas Sales in the UK have started to emerge from various sources.
Generally online sales were up 18.5% over Christmas compared to last Christmas (BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor) with the last week before Christmas being particularly “dazzling”. Key growth areas were food and clothing and footwear. The use of deals and voucher coupons in particular seemed to be pretty important. MetaPack reinforce these figures and go further showing a 30% year on year increase with the last week before Christmas going into Frenzy with double the amount of sales to last year in that last crucial week. This perhaps indicates that shoppers now have more faith in delivery services leading up to Christmas – and also perhaps becaue a lot of online stores now operate pre Christmas sales to boost sales once delivery prospects look bleak. Boxing day was the busiest ever according to Experian Hitwise.
Marks and Spencers – already the largest and most successful UK online venture – have announced a 22% increase in direct on-line sales during Christmas 2012 . This was largely through an extension of their next day delivery deadline and the introduction of their Christmas Food to Order service on-line, which contributed to a 12% increase in orders. John Leiws also had a record breaking year with sales close to 600 million pounds.
Food ordering at Christmas is clearly a rapidly growing market – ICO3 partner Simply Cornish Hampers enjoyed a 400% increase in sales from last year and will no doubt continue to grow next Christmas. In similar statistics Sainbury’s announced that its online Grocery store sales were up by a fifth – to reach new record highs. Waitrose, part of John Lewis, also announced large increases in online sales – with wine sales particularly strong.
Multi channel selling and mobile phone usage in particular continues to increase and become very significant. According to consumer research specialist Intersperience, 30% used their mobiles to carry out price checks and review products, with 1 in 5 consumers doing it there and then in stores to check how much cheaper they could buy the products online. Even more cheekily 20% of them actually bought the goods there and then in store! This Store to Web buying behaviour is increasingly being embraced by more ambitious online stores who offer discounts or incentives to buy online while in store and will I think be a far more prominent feature of high street online selling next year. Already major high street stores are offering free WIFI access to customers to use while they shop and we have heard that the new John Lewis store in Exeter will feature many innovative store to web incentives. A key peak in mobile phone usage came on Christmas day and boxing day according to Adfonic – not surprising perhaps that Happy Christmas shoppers were using their new smart phones for the first time – but I think it is more than this. Other figures, for example, released by John Lewis showed a huge surge in shopping for gadgets on Boxing Day.
Kindles sales were huge over Christmas and were this years must have gadget. 1.2 million Kindles were given as gifts this year according to a YouGov survey. That said more than half a million people received IPADS as a gift
Finally the Logan Tod & Co’s 6th annual Online Future Shopping Index predicts that next Christmas online shoppers will spend 18% to 22% more than they did in 2011.
Ill publish more statistics as and when I find them.