Online Sales Leading Above Retail
by Elana Birnbaum - July 22nd, 2010 1:03 pm
Years ago, the Internet was an unpopular shopping channel. Today, an e-business can thrive without a physical location, often surpassing Bricks-and-Mortar (B&M) stores in annual revenues. According to the US Census Bureau, while some retail industries still seem to dominate the market such as health care, in-store sales are falling significantly short of their online counterparts in a variety of industries. For example clothing internet sales came out to $17.1 billion, more than doubling retail sales of $7.1 billion.
Source: US Census Bureau
Exclusive Online Coupons
While you can’t deny the convenience of online shopping – no lines, no crowds, no searching aimlessly for items; now online shopping has another competitive advantage to add to its list – online discounts! With the help of affiliate marketing, shoppers dash to coupon sites to find the best bargains on the Internet. This unique marketing form can have your discount banners and products posted on hundreds of sites across the internet without paying a dime in advertising fees until after you see results. Popular sites such as www.retailmenot.com offer discounts for the savvy internet shopper and with the right affiliate marketing, retail stores can see drastic increases in sales.
Nowadays, having a cyber store might not even be enough. Huge sales are being traced back to stores Facebook Fan Pages and Twitters. Fans flock to keywords such as “discounts” and “exclusive Internet offer” and many companies are focusing their energy into turning their social networking sites into heavily discounted pages for their “fans” or “followers”. These new trendy techniques are some of the reasons contributing to why traditional retail stores can’t come up to par with e-store sales.
Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday
For decades, Black Friday, has been a retailer’s dream day and has been known as the biggest shopping day of the year. However, following in suit with the popular online trend, this is no longer true. A 2009 statistic showed that Cyber Monday drove 96.5 million Americans to shop online, an increase of 11.5 million from the previous year. Discount-hungry shoppers spent a total of $887 million this past holiday season, a 5% increase from last year. Browse marketing techniques such as SEO to make sure you’re attracting the big holiday spenders.
Related posts: