If all is going well for ecommerce businesses up and down the country this morning, few of you will be reading this on Monday morning.
If all is going well, you should be busily picking and packing and parcelling up a flurry of festive orders that came in over the weekend.
In many ways the weekend just past is likely to be the last bumper weekend before Christmas. Hopefully this week will be bountiful too with plenty of orders but come next weekend, we’d expect that sales will tail off a little as guaranteed delivery becomes harder to promise. The last Royal Mail promised delivery date is if you get it in the system First Class on Monday the 21st.
Of course, it seems likely that we’ll have some readers up north who will have been detrimentally affected by the weather and floods up in Cumbria and elsewhere. With the extreme weather having persisted over the course of a week, that will have caused some major headaches for some sellers.
And now it looks like we have snow forecast on the lowlands and not just the higher ground in some parts of the country, so we may see more problems there.
But hopefully most of us can look on the bright side? Tell us how this Christmas has shaped up to your expectations.
7 Responses
Local shopkeepers in my nearest small town high street say it’s dire so far, due mostly to online buying, but yet smaller ebay sellers for example don’t seem to be overly happy either, so who is actually making all the money this year ?
I’ve got a couple of ebay accounts and one is selling slowly with prices cut to the bone, whilst the other is getting only a handful of page views per item even at 99p with free postage – I dropped prices as a trial to see the response, with items which only a couple of years ago would have sold easily with postage added on top.
I’ve had my best sales this Xmas, almost doubled last year’s efforts. Black Friday was the best day… sales have slowed since that peak, but still about 30-40% more than my median daily sales throughout the year.
Depends on whether we’re talking gross margin or net margin. And even then there’s further to go on the bottom line! If we achieved 30% net profit that would be more than any major retailer and Chris’s work would be done! Merry Christmas to you all, especially Chris and Dan.