Cisco: Global e-commerce to hit $1.4 trillion by 2015. The Joy of Shopping: It’s All in the Mind - FITCH. Asos credits e-commerce innovation as sales soar. Asos posted a big jump in sales over Christmas and says its commitment to e-commerce innovation helped to attract consumers increasingly heading online to buy clothes. Sales for the four months to the end of December were up 38 per cent to £335.7m. In the UK, its biggest market, sales increased 37 per cent to £133.7m, while sales growth was particularly strong in Europe, up 69 per cent.
Active customers, described as those that have made a purchase in the past year, rose 41 per cent to 7.9m. Asos CEO Nick Robertson credits “significant improvements” to its customer experience for the sales boost. Asos offers features such as “Follow My Parcel”, which lets customers track their purchases in real time. It has also upped its marketing investment in recent months to support rapid growth, focusing in particular on digital, including pay per click and affiliate marketing, as well as country-specific campaigns. Asos booming sales. CD9-3%20Retail%202018%20MayReporto. 'One in five shops to close as ecommerce grows' One in five high street shops are expected to close in the next five years, according to a new report as separate survey finds a third of consumers now do most of their shopping online.
London’s Oxford Street VIP shopping day in December attracted shoppers but high streets face closures. More than 60,000 high streets shops are predicted to close and 164 retail chains to go into administration, according to the Retail Futures 2018 report by the Centre for Retail Research. The closures are predicted despite the Government-backed Portas Pilot scheme designed to revive local high streets.
Consumer spending has increased just 12 per cent since 2006 and the high street’s share of spending remains in decline. It is expected to fall to 40.2 per cent by 2014, down from 50 per cent in 2000, according to the report. A quarter of respondents expect to increase the amount they spend online over the next year. ASOS posts bumper Christmas sales as data shows online shopping boom | Business. Online fashion store Asos enjoyed a bumper rise in sales in the last four months of the year, the latest example in the recent swath of retailers' results to show the growing influence of the internet.
Sales at Asos – which has become a top destination for fashionable teen and twentysomething shoppers in countries ranging from China to the US – jumped a better than expected 38% to £336m in the four months to the end of December. Sales in the UK, Asos's biggest market, increased 37% to £134m. Nick Robertson, Asos chief executive, said: "We have been benefiting from a structural shift online for 10 years. By constantly improving the offer to our fashion-conscious twentysomething customers they are rewarding us with more sales.
" The British retailer said it was planning to double the size of its distribution centre in Barnsley by the end of this year, creating at least 300 more jobs, and to open a facility in northern Europe within the same period as it battles to meet soaring demand. Internet Shopping To Hit High Street Hard. One in five of Britain's high street shops could close by 2018 as more customers turn to the internet for their shopping, new research has found. A study carried out by the Centre for Retail Research warned that 62,000 shops could fold in the next five years. The independent retail analysis group estimates that around 316,000 workers would lose their jobs as a result, and large areas of Britain's high streets would be turned into housing. Online shopping is expected to surge over the next few years, accounting for 22% of retail spending by 2018 compared to 12.7% currently, the study suggests.
Professor Joshua Bamfield's report, called Retail Futures 2018, says the first closures will be pharmacies and health and beauty stores, followed by those selling music, books, cards, stationery and gifts, as well as DIY outlets. He told the Daily Mail: "The total number of UK retail stores will fall by 22% over the next five years from 281,930 to 220,000 in 2018.
How Retail Has Changed: Online vs the High Street. The way we shop has changed beyond recognition over the past few years. The culprit? The internet. We’ve all seen British institutions such as Comet, Jessops and HMV disappear from the high street recently only to be replaced by ‘to let’ signs or pound shops. Of course, the recession has played its part in their demise, but online shopping has undoubtedly affected the performance of most high street regulars. Unless, of course, they have embraced the thing that was threatening their success and used it reach further heights. Retailers which took their business online have been able to continue engaging with their customers, and even found it easier to reach the next generation of shoppers; a younger demographic used to getting everything they need from world wide web. What’s more, it’s opened doors for national brands to expand their offering to a global audience thanks to strategic website localisation (ASOS being a good case study for overseas success).
By Georgia Penny. High-street-chill-as-online-sales-soar-by-222-per-cent-8756646. Online sales, including the websites of retailers with physical stores, rocketed by 222 per cent – equal to an increase of £20bn – over the five years to December 2012, according to the British Retail Consortium. Despite the boost from new stores, non-online sales in stores only grew by 12 per cent over the same period, representing incremental revenue of £28.9bn. Nick Hood, a business risk analyst at Company Watch, the credit information specialist, said: "If ever confirmation was needed of the runaway growth of online shopping, these numbers demonstrate that consumer habits are changing in a fundamental way.
"Whether they are spending by mobile or via their tablets while on the move, or on the internet from the comfort of their homes, they are increasingly rejecting the concept of physical shopping except in the sense of using stores as showrooms. " The figures come at a time when one in seven shops in town centres in England and Wales is vacant, according to the Local Data Company.