Online sales in UK this Christmas season up 50%
It seems like some of the projections regarding a bumper Christmas shopping season have turned out to be true.. According to IMRG, online shopping in the UK during this past Christmas was over 50% higher than what it was last year. This growth has come at the expense of high street retailers who have reportedly recorded a drop in their Christmas sales.
As per a news report on e-consultancy, the biggest beneficiaries were Tesco & Amazon.com, with the latter recording an astounding 4 million orders on December 11. IMRG is predicting that online sales during the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas would have been about £3.7 billion.
All these figures are undoubtedly interesting for affiliates; better still, online sales now account for almost 10% of all retail sales in the country. I’ve viewed all increases in online sales as an opportunity for affiliates; yet, it is not as straight forward as that. The challenge is most certainly whether affiliates can continue to increase or even maintain their share of the pie?
One of the many challenges that affiliates will have to face upto is Web 2.0 /increasing ’socialization’ of the web (I’ve taken liberties with the use of that term). I’ve written previously that social networking is an opportunity that affiliates need to take cognizance of — I still retain that view; however, they also need to view it as a challenge that needs to be overcome. Here’s why — it is likely that in this era of Web2.0, merchants/ marketers are increasingly going to depend on end users to provide recommendations and market their products by the online ‘word of mouth’. In return these users will likely be compensated as well for their recommendations if it results in a paid transaction. uSuggest has a comparison shopping site along those lines, and I foresee the emergence of several others along these lines. In a sense, sites such as these are cutting down traditional affiliate marketers, who in many ways do the job of providing recommendations to their target users. Of course, affiliate marketers can still play a role by being active participants in sites such as these; I believe we may not have too much of a choice if we are to capitalize on the exciting numbers on online sales that we are seeing.
