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.

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!

Monday 7th December appears to have been this years Mega Monday – I will watch out for data to back this up and report ASAP

Argos has reported that customers have taken advantage of the Check & Reserve service to beat the recent postal strike, and my guess is this already popular proposition will see a sustained boost in demand even after the strikes…

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Argos Press Release:

Argos Statistics Show Significant Growth In Multi-Channel Customers Over The Recent Postal Strike Period

Nov 30, 2009 10:29 CET

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

A new research report says UK & US banks are in danger of losing online customers unless they improve the levels of personalisation and communication offered. The report from Gartner says people in both countries are heavy users of online banking and over 40% use at least two banking sites, meaning they are in a position to compare features.

The trends observed are interesting:

• Younger respondents value features that enable customisation of their online banking experience and are looking for additional financial planning tools to help them manage their money more effectively
• Older customers seek tools that let them use current services more effectively or communicate better and want features that make the online banking channel itself easier to use

Banks can learn from the Grocers:

Retailers have spent ten years working out how to build successful e-commerce businesses and in the last three years have been moving that to a multi-channel mix that involves services like ‘ring & reserve’, range extensions and of course online order tracking.

Banks seem to have been asleep at the wheel, it’s taken them an age to react to the fact that customers are demanding more self-service and looking to manage many of their regular transactions online. But at last the Banks seem to be reacting now that the pressure is on:  There is much talk in the big banks of cost-cutting programmes – I’m told by those who should know that a key focus of this is about getting the optimum number and location of branches and getting those online services to deliver what customers want and need to take the pressure off branches and especially off call-centres.

 So we may be on the brink of ‘multi-channel banking’ – let’s see if the Banks can catch up with the Grocers, especially now that one of the Grocers is a Bank!

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.

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.

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

This may well be the new acronym to push MCR aside – let me tell you about a concept I’ve been working on recently with Simon Clark and Ray Fowler. TCR takes retailing lessons cross-sector and impacts on media, telecoms and services companies dealing with consumers online and across multiple channels.

TCR is the end to end management of physical products and digital assets from production to consumption.

Consumers are buying physical goods and digital downloads through the same channels and increasingly from the same brands. TCR addresses the management of all these products and assets to ensure the desired customer experience and business performance.

As all consumer brands compete for share of wallet Retailers, Media and Telcos are battling each other in a rapidly converging market. Each will approach this opportunity with their own particular business and customer strategy and how each aims to differentiate may vary, but one thing is for sure. How effective they are in their end to end processes for creation, transaction and delivery of products and services will dictate their success.

• TCR is about how customers access your products and services through the range of channels available to them

• TCR is about how companies enable customers to do this effectively through their propositions, processes and systems

• The emergence of digital products and services in today’s broadband world means that physical and digital supply chain issues now overlap

I like Ray Fowler’s sound-bite to describe TCR – “from warehouses to websites, DVDs to MP3s”.

Is this the next new thing, is this the right definition, what do you think?