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I.co.uk the smallest short .uk domain
It is increasingly a Black Friday over here tomorrow and the Centre for Retail Research has told us thsat they are forecasting online UK sales of £363 million tomorrow. In the USA the situation is covered particularly well by comScore to whom we are indebted for the majority of our figures.
Historically online desktop information has been prevalent and we’re staying with this for our basic forecast.
As mobile purchases become increasingly significant we have also done an estimate on this front.
Our forecasts owe much to comScores seasons overview on likely increases.
Elsewhere Visa reckoned that UK purchases on their cards could run at £6,000 a second tomorrow which on our calculator comes to about £518 million in a day. If they represented say a third of all purchases then a total of £1.6 billion might be spent. Allegedly one in four purchases is made online so that might amount to £400 million which is not a million miles away from the forecast we have been given.sounds too high to us! The US may reach $1.75 billion so on a per capita adjusted basis this just might be talking up to £200 million.
On any further discovery we will add to our UK stats.
This week we produced our regular review of October’s Internet Retail Sales
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday published the the monthly retail sales figures for October (pdf) Full details are available on the ONS site.
Overall figures showed an increase in sales volumes of 0.8% (including fuel) on last month which according to Bloomberg was greater than its estimate of 0.3% obtained in a news survey of 23 economists. “Prices as measured by the retail-sales deflator fell an annual 1.5 percent in October, the biggest decline since 2002. Prices of auto fuel dropped 4.3 percent to the lowest level since 2010.”
The ONS on their preferred quarterly view noted continuing growth ” The three-month on three-month movement in the quantity bought showed continued growth for the twentieth consecutive month increasing by 0.4%. This was the longest period of sustained growth since November 2007 when there were 25 periods of consecutive growth..”
All the internet figures we quote are now the new seasonally adjusted statistics issued by the ONS. January 2014 was the one year in six when an extra week occurs statistically and we have annotated our headline graph to show an approximately comparable level of sales.
Our Internet sales headlines:
October and year to date stats for internet sales:
The ONS words this month are:
Key points
The proportion of sales made online fell by 0.1% to account for 11.2% of all sales in October 2014. Online sales increased by 7.5% compared with October 2013, this was the lowest year-on-year increase since November 2012 (6.9%).
Internet Sales in Detail
Seasonally adjusted Internet sales data are provided within this release. These seasonally adjusted estimates are published in the RSI internet tables and include:
Internet sales are estimates of how much was spent online through retailers across all store types in Great Britain. The reference year is 2011=100.
Key Points:
Average weekly spending online in October 2014 was £719.6 million. This was an increase of 7.5% compared with October 2013. This is the lowest year-on-year increase since November 2012 when it was 6.9%.
Table 4 shows the year-on-year growth rates for total Internet sales by sector and the proportion of sales made online in each retail sector.
Internet Sales
Table 4: Summary of Internet Statistics for October 2014 (seasonally adjusted)
We have added our annotations to the ONS table – The bold categories/ figures in the table are the primary constituents of the total (ie (a) + (b) + (c) = All retailing). Dept. stores, Textile etc, Household etc and Other stores are simply an analysis of (b) All non-food.
We have also added the weekly Internet sales figures by sector and the proportion they represent of all online sales.
Sector summary
The non-store retailing sector comprises of stalls and markets, mail order and those retailers that sell mainly online.
+ Whilst the ONS will not confirm the names of specific retailers within categories they did say that retailers selling wholly online with no physical outlets would be included in the Non store retailing category along with eg online mail order retailers.
The moving annual total, which we report, moved up again (it has increased EVERY MONTH since January 2009 to an all time high of £37.4 billion an increase in the month of 0.5% annualised 5.6%. The average this year is 14%. The long term compound average growth rate is around 15%.
The published weekly figure was £719.6 million which was well below our expectations but we only just fell short of the moving annual total which came out £0.1 billion below our estimate.
The average monthly increase this year is now about 0.5% but has been negative in 3 out of the last 4 months. We are optimistically looking for a seasonal recovery above average an increase of around 0.75% next month so we’re going for £725 million in November and a moving annual total of about £37.7 billion.
We have again included our experimental graph (e & o e!) showing the relative internet and non-internet, moving annual total, sales from late 2009 by month. As before it highlights that high street sales have been and continue to go nowhere! As, we have mentioned before, the Boston Consulting Group forecast in their report (The $4.2 Trillion opportunity) that this trend is likely to continue with the high streets market share contracting at around 2.75% a year from 2010 through 2016. Due to the exceptional 5 week month in Jan 2014 there is a 6 yearly jump to allow for the 53rd week!
Further details and explanations are either in the ONS release on the statistics or on their website. As previously mentioned a retail convention of a 4, 4, 5 week quarter is used by the ONS (March June September and December are 5 week months). To cater for the inconvenience of years not having 364 days every 6 years or so an extra week is included in the statistics. The ONS adds this in January which happened this year the previous one being in 2008.
We had our regular monthly article on retail sales which shows them returning to all time highs again in September.
Our favourite violinist Lindsey Stirling released another of her impressive videos (Round Table Rival)a couple of weeks ago which we will leave you with:Incidentally her tour comes to the UK this week in London then Manchester.