Half Empty or Half Full
November 14th, 2008
Our Finance director, Grant, “figures” out recent retail sales numbers:
It’s too early to predict the effects of the larger than expected Bank of England 1.5% interest rate cuts on X-mas sales, but some fairly gloomy retail sales figures came out yesterday with the British Retail Consortium (BRC) sales monitor for October.
They showed that like-for-like sales were down 2.2 per cent and total sales fell 0.1 per cent, the first annual drop over three years . However, you guessed it, online sales of non-food items actually rose 16 per cent during the same period.
Although non-store sales as a percentage of total sales are small by comparison, this reflects people are still willing to buy if the price is right and are using the internet more and more in this research/buying process.
So prospects to grow online sales are out there for the taking, and Mark’s and Spencer are one company who are taking this opportunity seriously. They announced recently that they are launching international online store a bid to reach online sales of £500m by 2010.
Cheers! Grant
