It’s called Black Friday for a reason. Stateside, it’s the day (the Friday after Thanksgiving) when many retailers move into profit, and the black, for the year as the holiday season starts with gusto.
In the UK, everything else is now out of the way too. Halloween, half term, Guy Fawkes and Remembrance Sunday are all past. It’s now downhill (ahem) to Christmas now.
And that’s why we ask the question: how is it all going? We would love to hear some views and perspectives on how the most brisk bit of ecommerce 2012 is progressing. There are plenty of reports that 2012 will be the most huge ecommerce Xmas ever. But equally, there are tales of austerity and restraint.
Retail sales were quite depressed in October and there are fears that may continue through the rest of the year as a possible triple dip recession looms. Another report says that people are so skint that they aren’t giving their swag to charity shops of late and are selling it on eBay themselves instead.
On a personal, and anecdotal, note I sense people are looking to have a less lavish Christmas in 2012 than they might otherwise have. Is that your experience?
As an ecommerce seller, at the very vanguard of the only sector looking forward to a bumper Christmas, we’d love your views on how it seems to be going so far.
Bonanza? Bumper? Brassic? Or too early to tell? Thank you for sharing.
10 Responses
Sales have been at record turnover levels all financial year, but mainly on low ticket items.
So far Christmas has been strange – goes really strongly for a few days then has a day when nothing moves and very low sales levels, then back to a strong few days. Overall not ahuge uplift from the last couple of months. I hope it just hasn’t got going yet. Always find peak shipments are later than the experts and tradition would have us believe.
If it doesn’t improve it could be a bit of a turkey!
So far the Christmas period has been very poor. Thinking back to 2011 probably about the same. However in 2011 we then had the appalling weather of December that just about killed Christmas altogether.
So what is December 2012 going to give us weather wise? My bet would be it is going to be as bad as December 2011. So Christmas 2012 is again going to be a waste of time.
Bumper.
Bumper year in fact, if this is a recession we will have one every year please.
Like Whirly a bumper year with record sales and this quarter is looking great as well.
This has been best year every for my company but it’s hard to tell whatever it’s caused by people spending more OR our hard work on increasing conversions, growing traffic, getting more repeat sales etc.
Even though we started to see early Xmas purchases already in September from our shops, I don’t think it will be much different from the last year, if not worse – probably around same figures.
Expecting some sales but this time of the year is usually pretty slow. Which is not unusual when you sell B2B and most of your customer base is at its busiest time.
Business is up 20% YOY overall, biggest sales day in 5 yrs in ebay 2 Sundays ago. Highest unit sales on Amazon yesterday. Amazon FBA steady. Amazon up 300% YOY
Sales gently rising daily.
For me its about having the cash to buy the stock. Stock is king. If I had more cash I would buy more an sell more.
All well here. Every month up on last year , with a particularly strong August, so can we have an Olympic Games here every year too.