Best ever online sales

[peterjhale]

Online retailers saw a big climb in sales during Christmas as they reported another record festive season, new data revealed today.

Web research group Hitwise UK says internet sales jumped 23% compared with Christmas 2003, making it the most successful festive season ever.

Hitwise said sales volumes grew stronger in the second half of 2004, with market share of all UK internet traffic directed at shopping websites increasing from just over 10% in August to more than 12% in December.


Did you all see this ?

[Ian J]

Originally Posted by peterjhale

sales volumes grew stronger in the second half of 2004, with market share of all UK internet traffic directed at shopping websites increasing from just over 10% in August to more than 12% in December.

Unless I am reading the figures wrongly that looks pretty poor to me. August is traditionally a poor shopping month with many people away on holiday.

[peterjhale]

It means of all online sales - 12% of traffic is towards shopping sites (effectively a 20% increase)

[inbakumar]

Peter,

I am not really surprised by the report. The online market place has lot more growth potential. More and more people are switching to broadband and there is more trust on online businesses than before. Needless to say, businesses with a credible brand image would be the real winners.

As for us, even though we are not an online business as such, the traffic levels for December was good. Compared to August 2004 (a good month on its own), December page views were higher by 24.3% even though the traffic level was higher by 8.5% only. All this despite a shorter working month and the holiday season. We are hoping that the trend would continue for a long time .

Just in case you are wondering, we have not done anything (except correcting minor errors) to the website at all since Spring 2004 when we updated a lot of content. On the negative side, our pr dropped from 5 to 4 recently .

I hope you had a fantastic December too as one would think many more people would have decided to set up their own businesses during the holidays.

Regards,

[ARTzWeb.net]

Well, new customer registrations were less than our worst predictions. Not sure what happened, since my site is coming in the top 10 of google results for our target keywords.

This week things started to go better than expected. It seemed to be a dead period for us (web hosting services)

[Inzvestor]

tbh it's probably the last thing on many peoples minds at Christmas time.

It was the last thing on my mind until I got an invoice from my old host with the next years fees statement, and within a matter of minutes I had cancelled my contract and moved to a new host (who was much more competitive)

You industry seems very cut-throat with little in the way of loyalty.

I wish you great sales in the next few weeks. There may be others like me looking for realistically priced hosting.

[peterjhale]

Trouble with moving hosts is it's a real pain (especially now I have this forum)

Static and standard php paged site is an easy one

[Inzvestor]

I guess it comes down to how willing and helpful both hosts are (particularly the hosts you are leaving)

[jetway]

In my experience, you probably won't get very much cooperation from the host you are leaving, smaller hosts are generally bitter that you are leaving, and larger hosts don't care either way so they'd rather not waste their time helping you set your site up else where, however the sign of a good host is one that is helpful in setting up your site and responsive to your problems when getting settled, most people run into their problems a lot more often in the beginning when they are unfamiliiar with a new host's procedures, etc, just a thought I thought I'd share