By Rieva Lesonsky
The National Retail Federation (NRF) is holding its annual “Big Show” in New York City this week, and lots of great stats are being released. Shop.org, the NRF’s digital arm and Forrester Research issued their annual State of Retailing Online report to “help retailers benchmark their online business.”
The report had four key takeaways for Web retailers.
- The companies surveyed in the 2013 report had an average growth of 28 percent from 2011 to 2012. Most also reported improvements in their site conversion rates, average order size and percentage of sales from repeat customers.
- As I’ve mentioned often recently (both in articles and presentations), mobile is hot. The retailers studied in the reports indicated, on average, they experienced a year-over-year sales increase from smartphones of 129 percent, and an astounding 178 percent sales boost from tablets.
- Not only are mobile sales soaring, but 36 percent of the retailers surveyed claim “the increased mobile sales and traffic have helped their company’s overall Web conversion rate.”
- Optimization is the e-tailers’ goal for 2013. They say their top priorities this year are to improve the conversion rates on their websites and redesign the “site experience.” Specifically, many say the checkout experience on their sites needs to be upgraded, which makes sense since I’ve seen many reports that consumer are often abandoning their shopping carts (for various reasons).
