How will the Paralympics affect your business?

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The Paralympic Opening Ceremony this evening marks the beginning of another 11 days of wall to wall sport on our televisions. The big question is how will this affect your business? The best indicator is the Olympics and according to Scot Wingo of ChannelAdvisor (and to save you reading any further) the answer is not at all!

Or is it? How did the Olympics affect your business? Did you notice any difference in sales other than that that can’t be attributed to the normal school summer holidays?

Scot has an interesting breakdown, which while not definitive as it’s based on sales by ChannelAdvisor customers, does give a pretty good insight of ecommerce during the Olympics. eBay was down 2.9% and Amazon sales by ChannelAdvisor customers was down slightly more at 7.7% during the Olympics. Paid search (4.4%) and Shopping Comparison Engines (1.1%) were such small differences that they’re not significant over such a short period of time.

Scot concluded that “we don’t see any material evidence that supports the ‘Olympics caused an e-commerce slowdown’ theory”, but then we’re based in the UK. It’s likely that your staff were taking summer holidays and so were your buyers. Whilst some may still be at work we know many workplaces had the Olympics showing on the TV in the office or warehouse.

We’re aware that many view the Paralympics as somehow second class to the Olympics. Even the Olympic Rings aren’t allowed to be used at the Paralympics, and instead their logo consists of three agitos, coloured red, blue and green, the three colours that are most widely represented in national flags around the world. The original Paralympic logo used five Tae-Geuks and was judged too similar to the five Olympic rings so had to be changed.

The vast majority of the country however view the Paralympics as equal or even better than the Olympics and for the first time ever the Paralympics looks set to be a sell out. We at Tamebay are big fans and are looking forward to seeing our Paralympians excelling and hopefully winning a bunch of gold medals.

The big question of course is how will the Paralympics affect your business? Did you see an upturn or downturn in sales during the Olympics? Are you a sports fan and will you be watching the Paralympics? Do you expect the second tranche of the London 2012 games to impact your business?

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