It’s a happy new year… if you’re an online, multichannel or mobile retailer

In our pre-Christmas blog looking at the festive trading period we predicted big growth for online and multichannel shopping for 2012 and it seems our predictions are coming true already!

Visits to UK e-retail sites reached record levels on Boxing Day, with Experian Hitwise reporting figures staggering in their quantity: 96million visits to UK e-retailer sites – up 19.5 percent on last year – and 13million hours spent by the nation shopping online. All this makes Boxing Day the single biggest e-shopping day ever in the UK.

IMRG reported multichannel retailers accounted for the majority of the visits during December, in particular on Boxing Day, when there were almost twice as many visits to multichannel brands than there were to online-only retailers. The figures reveal the gap between the online-only and multichannel retailers is narrowing considerably, with online-only retailers making significant headway into the dominance of the multichannel retailer.

Mobile was also a big winner. Sales via mobile made up more than 15 percent of all online sales on Boxing Day, according to IBM analysis, which is a 275 percent increase on 2010. And as we recently tweeted, John Lewis appeared to lead the pack announcing early on that the cash spent online on mobiles was up 46 percent in three days!

Mark Littlewood, our MD, comments: “This is great news for online, multichannel and mobile retailers. It demonstrates to all retailers how vitally important is it to have a professional online presence, multichannel marketing strategy and mobile-friendly site. Considering the experts are predicting a tough year ahead in terms of overall sales – predominantly for high street retailers – it would be a foolhardy not to invest in one or all of these routes if possible.”