Online retail and Christmas shopping: what’s occurring?

General Questions

Are you at the panic buying stage yet? Have you bought the majority of your own presents online? Do you expect better bargains online or in a shop? Do you like the traditional experience, look and feel approach, of high-street shopping? Do you research online but buy offline based on your research?

Professional Questions

Did you appraise your online retail clients of what was necessary for their online shopping sites to make the most of the November, December and January online shopping frenzies? Have your online retail clients been caught out with low stock, inadequate delivery mechanisms, off-putting customer service reputation, uncompetitive offers, and the rest? Are you and your colleagues running round like headless chickens to fire-fight glitches with online code and/or load-testing? Are all your online retail sites working well in the frenzy so that you can enjoy the Christmas spirit?

These are fundamental questions for now and the answers reflect what is happening with consumers. It’s important to remember you are also one of them. Your experience with online sites matters although you need to take your ‘expertise’ into account as possibly being ahead of trend perhaps. It’s wise to take on advice so see, Catching the Christmas Trade: 10 Tips for Online Shops, by Frank Breuss at Digital Marketing Magazine (4 December 2014).

With online shopping increasing 20% year on year but with Black Friday now out-performing even the Christmas rush, it’s a hard, competitive market. (See the Telegraph’s story reporting John Lewis Stores 17 December 2014).

There’s a lot to think about at a manic time for most. If you’re a stats person and you have clients across the retail sectors you might like to keep up with more general reports of ecommerce at ReportLinker.com

Happy shopping experiences – whether online or off!

Localisation gets strong endorsements

Suddenly the news seems a whole lot better about the UK. And some really good news for digital retailers came out of a recent report, The global retail e-mpire by OC&C strategy Consultants and Google that analysed three years worth of online retail across the US, UK, Germany, the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and France.

The UK is apparently the world's top ecommerce exporter. It comes down to a level of trust that consumers have about UK retailers. (See New Media Knowledge, E-commerce and trust: It is time to think more about Localisation (30.12.2013). The consumers believe that they will receive the goods they pay for from the UK while they are not so sure about other countries, even their own.

The analysis links this trust to the history of the UK retail market and to effective localisation strategies employed by the top digital retailers. It may surprise you to find that some of these top e-tailers were digitally born and bred, while other traditional brands have made good on their reputations. (See Media Week, UK leads world's ecommerce exports as fashion brands travel well, by Arif Durrani, 20.1.2014)

It's not easy to localise effectively. Phillip Rooke of Spreadshirt, quoted in The global retail e-mpire at OC&C, highlights several of the aspects of localisation strategies such as working across many and varied tax and law jurisdictions, across languages, across currencies, across several dispersed factories and offices.

Scott Heimes, in the New Media Knowledge article mentioned above, gives many points about how localisation needs to fit the consumers' expectations which vary according to country and culture. Perhaps his strongest point is this:

Failure to localise for each region can result in a sales loss of 30 percent or more. Companies that get it right, however, will be able to capitalise on the growing generation of online shoppers, wherever they may be.

So, there are challenges to make good on the hope that the report brings for UK e-tailers. But we have got a head start and that's quite something in the digital age.