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1. Extend prospect and customer base. Your brand and offering can reach a larger prospect base than it might through traditional media due to social media’s strong audience numbers, especially on sites like Facebook.

2. Support entire purchase process. While some media formats focus on  intent initiation and conversion-to-purchase, social media provides useful information at every step of the buying cycle including: need initiation and research, engagement, purchase, post-sales support including returns and additional product purchase, and advocacy.

Retail and brand businesses surveyed by Adobe Systems are overwhelmingly looking to deploy mobile websites as their mobile strategy, rather than downloadable apps, by a factor or 10 to one. The first annual Adobe Scene 7 Mobile Commerce Survey out this week finds that 80% of businesses surveyed are planning or having already deployed a mobile website. Just 8% cited a downloadable application-only mobile commerce strategy as their way ahead.
The survey uncovered four key areas of focus for businesses’ mobile strategies: promotions, commerce, product information and branding. 75% of respondents named promotions as the core of their mobile strategy, validating the mobile channel as an important method to drive traffic and support multi-channel commerce.
The survey also found that more than 55% of respondents cited full-screen image zoom and videos as indispensable viewing features for driving conversion, while an additional 96% asserted the most effective visual merchandising features were catalogues and brochures, alternative images, and zoom and pan features.
The survey also found that, while only 18% of respondents currently use rich visual merchandising features for mobile commerce, up to 81% said they had plans to deploy these features, implying richer mobile experiences will be created and offered over the next 12 months.
“Multi-channel shoppers tend to purchase more; therefore, companies must effectively engage customers by delivering consistent, rich experiences across all channels – including mobile – to maintain and fuel current double-digit e-commerce industry growth rates,” said Sheila Dahlgren, senior director of product marketing at Adobe. “The survey results demonstrate the opportunities that exist for companies to fully leverage rich visualization features to improve their emerging mobile presences and drive cross-channel sales.”

Shoppers spent £4.4bn online last month, according to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index. This is the highest growth rate since June 2008.

In the first half of the year consumers have now spent £26.2bn online in the UK, Up 15% on the same period last year.  

 

Internet sales in May were worth more than 7% of the total UK retail market, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The experimental figures from the UK’s official statistics body, showed that the weekly value of internet sales last month was £409m. That equates to approximately 7.4% of total retail sales, excluding car fuel.
The figure is lower, however, than the 8.1% share of the market that online sales took in April, according to the ONS figures.

The ONS figures showed the value of sales in the non-store retailing sector, which includes online sales, grew by 12.2% in May, compared to the same time last year. At the same time the volume of non-store sales was up by 11.8%.

The rise comes against a context of an overall 4.4% rise in the value of retail sales in May. By volume, they rose by 2.2%.
Food stores saw sales rise by 1.4% in value, while growth in non-food stores came in at 5.4%. The largest rise (8.5%) was in non-specialised stores, while textile, clothing and footwear was up by 6.6%. Household goods stores lagged behind at 2.7% growth.

British Retail Consortium director general Stephen Robertson said the official figures bore out its findings. “Sales revived in May as summer weather arrived and distortions caused by the timing of Easter ended,” he said. He said television sales grew in May, driven both by the World Cup and discounts. But, he added: “With the tournament in full swing, there should be further gains for other football merchandise, such as flags and replica kits, which will show up in the June figures.” Among the goods to benefit, according to Experian Hitwise’s World Cup search figures, could well be vuvuzelas, since a 20% rise in searches has been recorded.

In the meantime, however, figures from BDO’s High Street Sales Tracker for the week ending June 13, showed that the football was keeping shoppers off the high street, with like-for-like store of just 3.6%. Fashion saw growth of 4.3% but non-fashion was static at 0.4%. Non-store sales, which include online and mail-order, rose by 32.3%.

Don Williams, head of retail at BDO LLP, said: 
“After two very strong weeks, there was a marked deceleration in high street spending this week with most retailers reporting slower growth. We didn’t see double–digit gains this time as excited England supporters, quite apparently, were preoccupied with supporting their favourite team.”

 

Retail sales continued to grow fastest online in March, new figures out today show.

Some £4.5bn was spent online in March, according to figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, a rise of 15% from the same time last year. The rise came as warm weather inspired people to shop for new clothes, where retailers saw a 27% rise in sales. Footwear and accessories were the fastest growing areas of the market, with rises of 58% and 55% respectively.

The figures contrast with today’s UK retail figures from the Office for National Statistics, which showed the value of total UK retail sales in March was up by 4.4% to an estimated £29.9bn. Food stores grew by 1.2%, while non-food stores were up by 6.7%. Clothing and footwear grew by 2.8%.
The ONS is experimenting with producing online figures, which showed that about £372m was spent online every week in March. It put the market share for online sales at 6.9%.

Shoppers with a multichannel strategy did best among online retailers, according to the IMRG figures. It found that those traders with stores and online facilities saw year-on-year sales rise by 28% in March, compared with 1% for online-only retailers.

Tina Spooner, director of information at IMRG, said: “There is a strong trend emerging showing that high street retailers with an online presence are playing an increasingly significant role in the e-retail sector. Retailers with a diverse multichannel offering will no doubt continue to reap the rewards of their investment in the online space.”

Chris Webster, vice president, retail consulting and technology, Capgemini, said the figures demonstrated the resilience of online retail. “The retailers themselves, particularly those with an online and a store presence, have fought hard to attract and retain customers, even in a period of political uncertainty,” he said.
Bruce Fair, managing director of Kelkoo UK, said: “We expect this rate of growth to continue through 2010 and predict that online sales could account for 10.5% of total retail spend by the end of the year.”

John Lewis said johnlewis.com sales were up by 48% on last year, while fashion sales more than doubled. Shopping.com said its home and garden sales rose by 51%.

The IMRG figures showed that online travel sales rose by 14% in March and chime with a report from Kelkoo, carried out by the CEBR, that forecast the UK would spend £41.1bn on travel in 2010, up by 2.4% on last year, or £669 per person. This follows a bad year for travel in 2009 when overall sales fell by 8.4%.

Online travel sales however, which grew by 18.5% in 2009 and, Kelkoo forecasts, will grow by 13% to £17.6bn in 2010.

However there were fears that the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, which grounded UK planes for six days up to and including Tuesday, could cost the UK economy £500m and jeopardize the travel industry recovery.

On Friday, discount high fashion site The Outnet hosted a “pop-up Sale”, offering lots of designer goodies for just a £1. At first glance it could be easy to see how the site could have been deluged with customers far beyond its expectations.
But customers had to register in advance of the Sale going live, so The Outnet will have had good visibility of the numbers it should have expected to try and log on to bag a bargain.

The problem appears to be because it did not plan for everyone who was registered for the Sale trying to log on and buy something at the same time.
In a message to customers that was posted up on Facebook on Monday, The Outnet director Stephanie Phair apologised for the frustration many customers experienced.

She wrote: Clearly, while we were prepared for the volume of traffic the sale would deliver, in some markets, the UK mainly, we were overwhelmed by the speed at which you came to the site this morning. This remarkable volume – up to nine orders a second – led the site to crash for many of you, and I want to say that we are very sorry to all those who didn’t get to buy anything at the sale.’

The Outnet has also promised to take on board the many comments it received on its customer service, so it can provide a better shopping experience in the future.
If a luxury retailer had planned a similar Sale at one of its stores, offering goods at nominal prices, it would have expected to be doing some major crowd control. Yet when something similar is tried on the web, still there persists this myth that because your customers are sat at their desk or at a computer at home that they are not in a queue.

In reality, any time a site experiences high traffic volumes, and especially high levels of customers trying to transact simultaneously, then there will be at least a slowdown in service, if not a complete failure.
Just because you can’t see your online customers pushing and shoving to get through your doors, doesn’t mean they are any less frustrated by a poorly managed event than if they had come to your store in person.

In today's newsletter we reveal that Pricerunner.co.uk has gone to some lengths to point out just how much more expensive shopping on the high street can be, compared to online. Its mystery shoppers scoured 11 high streets across the UK to find out just how much more consumers can spend in bricks and mortar shops, compared to their online rivals.

Pricerunner describes this difference, of some 31% across a basket of fast-moving consumer goods, as a 'high street tax'. Retailers will protest that they'd struggle to compete on price with the lowest cost venture to be found online.

But the reality increasingly is that customers do use price comparison websites to find the lowest possible price for that must-have item. That must be part of the reason why online sales are rising fast while high street sales are falling.

High-street retailers may not be able to compete on price - but what they have always had going for them is convenience. But it's no longer enough just to be there. Stores must also offer competitive prices, even if they're not the lowest, alongside customer service that challenges what's to be found online in terms of convenience.

That's something that John Lewis, a recognized leader in multichannel retailing, is putting the emphasis on in its new ad campaign, also covered in the newsletter, which is based on service, quality and price.

Elsewhere in today's newsletter you'll see both Tesco and Asos reporting convincing rises in their online sales, while fashion designer Paul Smith's new website has extended its use of e-commerce.