Amidst all the bad news on the high street there is one bright spot when it comes to physical retailing – the shopping centre. Despite national figures that show 1 in 7 British shops are currently unoccupied, there is major growth in high end shopping centres that act as destinations for consumers. In fact rents are rising by 5-6% in larger centres with very few shops left empty and multiple...
The Christmas shopping season is in full swing. We’ve had Mega Monday (where online orders reached an estimated £10,000 per second), and overall Christmas ecommerce is expected to exceed £4.6 billion, despite the recession.Festive sales are vital to hard-pressed retailers. Given the overall economic picture and the importance of Christmas, those companies that fail to generate re...
Successful retailers understand that knowing your customer is a key part of delivering a tailored experience. In the offline world that can be quite straightforward – you can see the people coming into your shop, ask them questions about their needs and provide the right answers and products.Online it is more difficult – while you can look at the customer journey, it can be hard to bui...
christmas 2007 (Photo credit: paparutzi) It seems strange to be talking about Christmas in mid-summer, but plans for the festive season are well under way at most retailers. Decisions about key products are being currently made and programmes of store refurbishments are happening now as companies seek to be ready for their busiest time of the year. Current poor economic conditions really do ...
When it comes to online retail, customers are obviously looking to buy products as cheaply as they can. However price is not the only factor, with a myriad of research studies demonstrating that customer service and the overall experience have a significant impact on where people buy online.A lot of this comes down to trust – customers want to be reassured that their order is going to be dis...
Online retail is becoming ever more competitive, meaning that for retailers the experience and service they provide for their customers is crucial to winning and retaining business.So new research from Experian should act as a wake-up call to ecommerce companies. It found that an estimated £1.02bn of online shopping transactions were abandoned by UK consumers in 2011, with 20% giving up on t...
With the UK in the grips of recession, this will be a make or break Christmas for many struggling retailers. There’s just a month to go until Christmas and while predictions are that consumers will still be spending, they are going to leave it much later and shop around searching for bargains. Customer service as well as price will be a key factor in where they decide to spend their hard-ear...
A new mystery shopper study from eDigital Research points to increasing levels of customer satisfaction with online shopping. The research, conducted in August, compared the customer journey on 51 UK retail websites, ranking them on a number of criteria. Overall the results showed that customers were happier than they have ever been, due to investment in website improvements (particularly search) ...
It is widely acknowledged that the UK is the largest online market in Europe – hitting £44 billion in 2010, and expected to reach £51 billion this year. However other countries are growing as fast, if not faster, with the entire European population turning to email and web channels. Forty per cent of EU consumers bought goods and services over the Internet in 2010, with sal...