Consumers shrugged off worries about identity theft and
security to push online retail sales to a record £4.2bn , taking a
15% share oftotal retail sales, in
July.
Sales from multi-channel stores caught up to those from purely
web-based outlets for the first time, said market analyst
eDigitalResearch, in a report released this week.
eDigitalResearch, which has monitored online sales since
December 2000, said traditional retailers such as Tesco, John Lewis
and Marks & Spencer are challenging the lead set by Amazon.com
and play.com.
"With
online sales set to grow significantly, this is a massive
commercial opportunity for pure-play and multi-channel retailers
alike," said the researcher.
eDigitalResearch founder Chris Russell said both sides still had
some way to go to meet customers' expectations. "It is increasingly
important to leverage the growth in social networking by using Web
2.0 technologies to deliver blogs, wikis and chat rooms," he
said.
Russell added that the encouraging figures hid the opportunity
cost of customers who abandoned their shopping baskets at the point
of payment because of security issues or frustration with the
system, or on finding items out of stock.
The figures also did not show the costs of fulfilment, product
returns or customer acquisition and turnover (churn).
"This surge in online activity denotes growing consumer
confidence despite escalating fears of
identity
theft and poor online security," he said. "If organisations are
to truly maximise this confidence they need to understand it is the
end to end consumer experience that dictates whether they will shop
at that outlet again."
eDigitalResearch has used more than 10,000 mystery shoppers over
the past seven years to complete online purchases. Surveys of their
experiences cover topics such as first impressions of the home
page, search experience, product range, the shopping basket,
ordering, delivery and returns, after sales service and overall
assessment.