Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2013!!! Well for the retailers who underwent a “not so good holiday season” for 2012, I wish them Happiness and Prosperity for 2013, again.

Overall the conversion ratio for retailers globally and annually was towards the downside this season. Some experts even compared it as the second worst for over a decade, after the slowdown of 2008.

So during this holidays, time and inquisitiveness on my side, I tried digging a few key points as whats basically causing this havoc. The facts that I could uncover were fascinating but practical indeed.

Today’s buyers are more empowered with easily accessible information and thus demanding. In order to cater to smarter consumers, retailers need to perform smart. In short transform from being product to customer centric.

A few Key Points that I could gather are:
85% of shoppers expect a seamless experience across all retail channels.
13% of retailers are able to provide a “consolidated” shopping experience across channels.

Now lets look at the figures for this year:

So an overall increase of 15% for 2012. Well that’s been standard for the last few years. Its obviously is below expectation and alarming figure for few.

A significant amount of the purchase done for this season was done online and retailers paid a heavy price too for poor web performance.

Obviously, poor load time caused a greater deal of annoyance during the holiday season and apart from increasing bounce rates and turning off buyers on several brands, the monetary loss that followed triggers an alarm for many.

Lets put a few facts infornt of us and that will hike up the ratio of the loss by a few fold. May trigger a few damage control measures too.

1. In 2012, 167 Million users in US Shopped online. Well that’s 53% of total US population. By 2016, its expected to reach 200 Million.

2. 10% growth was found across all e-retail categories with focus on sports & fitness products, along with Watches & Jewelry. By 2016, about 9% of total retail sales will be online and the online spend will increase to 62%. So poor load times will be even costlier by 2016.

3. 1 in 10 e-com dollars were spent via m-com for 2012. Infact 9% of e-com transactions got done via tablets or mobile phones. 74% of surfers leave the website if the site takes more than 5 mins to load.

So a 1 second delay in load time is costing Amazon $1.6 billion (annually) in 2012. Whats the cost for 2016? Well, Lets watch…..