A new survey of 550 North American retailers doing business on the
Web shows that companies with established mail-order catalogue
businesses are virtually the only ones making profits online at
this stage.
The least successful group of online retailers are those that have
a Web-only presence, said Peter Stranger, a vice president at The
Boston Consulting Group (BCG), during a teleconference yesterday.
But while bricks-and-mortar companies with added online operations
aren't doing as poorly as Web-only retailers, Stranger said, most
of them have yet to make a profit.
BCG released the survey along with Shop.org, an association of
online retailers and part of the Washington-based National Retail
Federation. The two organisations, which conduct such surveys on a
quarterly basis, said 156 of the 550 respondents gave detailed
answered about their businesses.
Despite the continuing difficulties being experienced by most
online retailers, Stranger and Elaine Rubin, Shop.org's executive
director, both said the survey revealed a number of bright spots.
For example, Rubin said the Internet-only retailers that have
managed to survive the shakeout in the business-to-consumer market
"are incredibly strong".
The study also predicted that online retail sales would total $65bn
(£45.4bn) this year. Rubin said e-commerce purchases would probably
account for around 2.5% of all retail sales in North America this
year, up 1.7% from last year. The expected increase is "really good
news" for online retailers, she said.
To put the online retail numbers in perspective, Wal-Mart Stores
last month reported bricks-and-mortar sales of $33.7bn during the
nine-week period between 3 February and 6 April. The online
retailing business is "still in the early days, [but] we're not in
infancy anymore," Rubin said. "We have probably moved on to being a
toddler."
As the industry matures further, she added, Shop.org expects to see
more partnerships emerge between traditional retailers and
online-only outfits, such as a deal announced last month in which
Borders Group turned to Amazon.com for help on the Internet.
"We are going to see a lot more of that," Rubin said. "Retailers
are under pressure to build their capabilities and learn this
business as quickly as they can." Despite the trend, though,
Stranger predicted that more competition will emerge in vertical
markets that are currently dominated by one or two online
retailers, such as the Internet travel business.
Other highlights of the survey included the following findings,
according to Shop.org and BCG:
- Broadband capabilities could help increase the overall
acceptance of online shopping by providing richer experiences for
Web-site users.
- Mobile e-commerce technology isn't likely to have a big
short-term business impact because few shoppers are actually taking
full advantage of it and most online retailers see wireless devices
primarily as customer service facilitators.
- Established off-line retailers will continue to gain market
share on the Internet, at the expense of Web-only
companies.