online sales - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

The UK’s online retailers generated some £46.6bn in sales last year, up 54% on 2006, according to new stats from the IMRG.

However, there were signs that the sector had not escaped the effects of the consumer credit crunch towards the end of the year.

Once again, online retailers have had a more successful Christmas than their high street counterparts, with early reports suggesting that internet sales continued to rise rapidly.

According to the British Retail Consortium, UK retailers suffered their worst December for three years.

Here's a round-up of Xmas-related sales figures in the UK and across the Atlantic...

WebAds, the Holland-based European internet advertising network, has opened a UK office in London.

The company has launched a new, localised website at webads.co.uk, and appointed a management team at premises in Clerkenwell to service advertisers and publishers in Britain and around Europe.

The IMRG has predicted that the UK online sales boom will continue through Christmas into next year, with the internet driving sales of up to £42 billion in 2007, up from about £30 billion this year.

The prediction comes in the wake of the biggest ever month for online retail sales. A record £2.7 billion was spent online last month by UK shoppers, beating the record set last December.

Four seconds is the maximum length of time the average online shopper will wait for a web page to load before potentially abandoning a retail site.

In the research by Akamai, poor site performance ranked second only to high product prices and shipping costs as leading factors for dissatisfaction among online shoppers.

Research in the US has revealed the extent to which frustrated online shoppers hold grudges against online retailers and their physical counterparts.

The research, by US internet performance tracking company Gomez, reveals that 65% of online shoppers would stop or reconsider shopping at a company’s physical store if they had a poor online experience.

Online customer service departments may be dealing with up to five times more emails in the pre-Christmas run up than at any other time of the year.

The two weeks before Christmas will be a busy one as anxious customers contact retailer’s customer service departments to see whether their purchases are going to turn up in time for the big day.

A survey released today by the Office for National Statistics shows the increasing popularity of e-commerce among businesses, with a massive rise in online sales volumes last year.

The ONS e-commerce survey, based on results from businesses with 10 or more employees, shows rapid growth both in the use of Information and Communications Technologies, and the value of trade over the internet.