Coremetrics: December 2009 Online Sales Top 2008

Retail Sales Increase 6.0 Percent Year-over-Year

SAN MATEO, Calif., December 16, 2009 – As the Christmas holiday approaches, the U.S. online retail sector showed strong sales results from Dec. 1 – Dec.14, 2009 compared to the same period last year according to marketing optimization firm Coremetrics.

The company’s analysis revealed the following trends:

* Online retail sales from Dec. 1 – Dec. 14, 2009 were up 6.0 percent compared to Dec. 1 – Dec. 14, 2008 (year-over-year).

However, when compared to Cyber Monday this year (Nov. 30, 2009), the analysis revealed the following trends:

* Average Order Value (AOV) was down 6.7 percent from its Cyber Monday peak.
* The average number of items per order showed modest gains, with an increase of 2.0 percent. This number, combined with the drop in AOV indicates that shoppers remain extremely value conscious, willing to purchase more items, but not spend more money per order.
* Unsurprisingly, the number of new consumers shopping online was down nearly 8 percent from its Cyber Monday surge.

“December online retail sales have been strong, anchored by good momentum on Cyber Monday, which delivered the strongest online sales results of the year so far,” said John Squire, chief strategy officer, Coremetrics. “However, sales seem to have peaked on Cyber Monday, largely due to the aggressive and extremely attractive promotions and special offers that many retailers offered early in the season. Consumers seem to have done the bulk of their shopping earlier than in past seasons and we anticipate that sales will stay largely flat through the rest of December as shoppers focus on last-minute gifts and not on big-ticket items.”

Source
These findings are based on data from Coremetrics Benchmark™, a peer-level benchmarking solution that measures online marketing results, including commerce data, against those of the competition. More than 500 leading U.S. retailers, contribute their analytics data to Benchmark. All data is aggregated and anonymized. Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Bloomingdale’s, Coldwater Creek, L’Occitane en Provence, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot, PETCO and Williams-Sonoma are just a few of the participating companies.

Coremetrics recently enhanced Benchmark to include near-real-time data and added advanced functionality, such as sales trends by comparison period, conversion rates from Pay per Click (PPC) campaigns, and website traffic by browser type. Over the last year, Coremetrics has nearly doubled the number of companies participating
in Benchmark.

Source: Coremetrics