January 11, 2006 | Wednesday
NMA: “Record Christmas sales online surpass analysts’ predictions”
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in News |Online Sales
The first issue of 2006 of New Media Age hit our desks today, and brings with it many interesting headlines. The one quoted above provides one of the less surprising (in light of several recent items posted on the Latitude site) stories.
Andrew McCormick reports:
Research company Hitwise reported that visits to retail sites were up 14% years on year for December 2005. Meanwhile, etail [sic] industry body IMRG‘s latest statistics revealed that UK Internet sales for a single month broke £2bn for the first time last November. This was an increase of 50% compared to the same period in 2004, and the largest year-on-year increase for 22 months.
Sales look likely to beat analysts’ predictions for 2005. Research commissioned by Lycos predicted online spend £3.9bn for November and December 2005, while IMRG predicted £5bn (NMA 01.12.05). The upward trend in online retail looks set to continue into the January sales period, as visits to retail sites in creased 16% for the final week of December compared to the same period in 2004, says Hitwise.
But as we noted here just last week, this doesn’t mean that selling online is easy. NMA backs this up, writing:
42% of online shoppers hit on sluggish, unresponsive or unavailable sites while hunting for bargains [post-Christmas], according to research by Web hosting company Hostway Worldwide. Almost half of those who experienced difficulty said they went directly to a competitor’s site when their first choice was slow or defective. Four-fifths of those experiencing difficulty said they then developed a negative view of the [original] company.
It seems appropriate here to quote what we said about this whole matter exactly one week ago:
[A]s the competition grows more ferocious, squeezing out the maximum amount of return on your investment in sales generation becomes even tougher. How well your company fares depends on the expertise driving your strategy, and the effectiveness of its implementation. As the evidence clearly shows, the stakes are higher than they have ever been.
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