The ups and downs of selling online

Recently e-consultancy has done a couple of stories about selling online and I thought I'd pull out some of the most relevant stats for you, and point you towards the original articles.

The first stat that I thought was interesting was that online sales are generally estimated to make up 7-15% of a brand's sales. e-consultancy was averaging it at 10%. Although that may work very well for high street brands, we think the story's very different for small independent retailers - if you're in a niche market and online suddenly opens you up to customers without a geographic boundary, you can suddenly reach a whole lot more people. We know that one of our clients is currently taking more than 50% of their sales online.

Interestingly, a number of the brands that e-consultancy originally noted (Feb 08) weren't selling online still have no plans to go online in Sep 08. Whether that is because they figured they'd already lost the battle (I can see that Morrison's and Somerfield may feel that Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's have already beaten them and pilfered all their potential online customers) or because their sales are such high-volume and low-value (though with Asda's George going online, Primark and H&M have more to lose) that they figure it's not worth it, I am surprised that such big brands are still unable to take advantage of online selling.

And then finally e-consultancy summed it all up in a lovely little article that pulled together the drawbacks of not selling online - apart from the loss of a revenue stream that most retailers would be very pleased to have in today's economic climate. Two in particular stick out for me - the obvious one that without online you're limiting your customers to buying from specific geographic locations where you have stores, and to your trading hours - online neatly leaps these two hurdles. And the second one is that you are immediately losing out to your competitors - who can bid on your brand name in an effort to snaffle your customers, or where your customers choose to shop from them because your brand isn't available online. Very few brands have such customer loyalty, or such brand exclusivity, that a customer would refuse to buy elsewhere. Online makes is so easy to search for particular products and compare prices that brands who aren't online are definitely losing out on sales.