actinic
online marketing blog
Friday, January 4, 2008
Christmas Trading: The Internet Flies While The High Street Dies
The first Christmas trading results are beginning to come in, and it looks like another bumper Christmas for online businesses, and more misery for the high street.
An email poll among our own users – mostly small and medium businesses in the retail sector – found a 27% rise in the number of people buying online, and a 46% increase in revenue (www.actinic.co.uk/news/080102.htm). So not only are more people shopping on the web, but they are spending more as well.
Other results suggest that small and medium businesses did at least as well as their larger counterparts. DSG, representing Dixons and FotoVista, reported a 31% rise in online sales – somewhat less than the smaller businesses represented in the Actinic poll. And Next, who at the time of writing have yet to report their online results, recorded an overall increase of a miserly 0.3% (www.internetretailing.net).
The biggest rise of all was reported on Christmas Day itself. Research by the Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) found 4.4 million people spending £84 million ordering goods online on the 25th December – up a massive 269% on the previous year. (www.imrg.org).
In comparison, the high street may have done appallingly badly. Both DSG and Next recorded an actual fall in like for like sales in their stores in the pre-Christmas period – of 0.3% and 1% respectively.
# posted by Bruce Townsend @ 8:03 AM 
