Online fashion retailers have seen an overall 31% increase in traffic over the past 12 months, which has highlighted a massive gap with just a 1% increase for traditional catalogue companies. This last statistics comes from the released ‘Engaging Online with the Empowered Customer’ report by Experian.

It also found that many retailers were still failing to capitalise on the increased take-up of online shopping by not encouraging repeat purchasing. Just 30% of customers created almost 70% of revenues. The report also highlights that 45% of customers were single purchasers.

It's Play.com Time

Play.com has increased sales by 24% year-on-year over the Christmas period, according to the latest report released.  As an avid user of the site myself I can understand the success where others have struggled with its easy too use shopping cart, free delivery and on many products including larger electrical ones the best price.

The Play.com’s peak trading time was recorded as the 8 December, with over a 1,000 orders per minute being processed, up from 700 the previous year.

Quote from Simon Perree, CEO at Play.com, “Despite concerns this year about the credit crunch and holding back on gift spending, Play.com has had a hugely successful Christmas with strong sales across all product categories.”

Even with the current Credit Crunch issues sweeping the nation Internet advertising spend seems to still enjoying a level of growth with overall spend reaching 1.68bn in the first half of this year, which is a 21% like-for-like increase based on last year (Source: IAB).

The highlights of the latest survey is a 28% year-on-year growth for paid search, which now accounts for 58.3% of total online spend and almost breaking the 1bn barrier (981m) for the first time in a six-month period.

Other areas saw Display advertising rise 16.3% year-on-year to 333.8m, this was helped by a 36.6% increase in investment on embedded formats such as banners, rich media and video via social media networks.

Report shows that the majority of online display ad spend is still being achieved via the major portals and online publishers, but sales networks representing thousands of smaller sites have increased their volumes and accounted for 41% of all display expenditure.

Classifieds advertisements grew by 30.2% year-on-year to 361.6m as recruitment, property, automotive and small ads continued their migration to the internet from print classifieds, which declined 10% year-on-year.

Technology leads the market sector advertising spend table with a 17.3% market share, followed by finance at 11.9%, entertainment & media at 10.7% and recruitment at 9.9%.

Overall online increased its market share by four points to 18.7% of the total UK ad market, only 0.6% behind total press display (19.3%) and 3% behind TV (21.7%). The total advertising market was £8.98bn, down 0.7% year-on-year, during the period January to June 2008. The advertising market would have experienced a 4.6% decline without internet advertising growth.

With the Credit crunch still biting it is predicted that Christmas shoppers will turn to the Internet pushing sales up by 15 per cent from last year. Online sales for the final 3 months of this year are forecasted to be around 13.16 billion.

December the 8th has been ear marked as the biggest online shopping day, so let’s see if the statistics agree on the 9th.

Miva has announced a further loss of 6.3 million dollars (£3.3m) in Q2, this is in the week that it rejected a takeover proposal from video search specialist Blinkx.

This is now the second consecutive quarter that the MIVA network had suffered a loss, being down by 5 million dollars (£2.6m) for Q1 2008 Revenues were at 30.2 million dollars (£15.8m) for the quarter, down from 32.7 million dollars (£17.1m) year on year.

Quote:

Peter Corrao, Miva CEO and president, said, “The most recent quarter has been a transitional one for our business. We’re encouraged by the results of the growth initiatives that we’ve been working towards, such as the continued rollout of our Alot toolbar and home page brand and the continued growth of destination sites like Spill.com.”