John Lewis Announces 40% Online Sales Boost
John Lewis has announced an online sales increase of 40% despite how slow the market has been throughout 2012
Despite the incredibly slow market, John Lewis has announced a huge 40% boost in online sales for the first half of 2012, which when combined with in store sales growth has in turn led to a total sales growth of 12.9%.
John Lewis managing director Andy Street put the improvement down to "innovation, quality and value" with technology sales growing by 31.8%, fashion sales by 72.% and home goods sales increasing by 6.2%, however many experts outside of John Lewis feel there may be other causes of this vast improvement in sales, both online and in store.
The in store digital kiosks and order and collect functions showed the strongest growth of all in store departments with some stores showing increases of over 25%. The doubling of the Click & Collect business has contributed massively to this increase in sales, with much of this being down to the collaboration with supermarket Waitrose, which is also part of the John Lewis Partnership.
The closer to the midpoint of the year we got the more sales increase began to slow, before greatly increasing during the Olympic Games, as Tim Harrison the head of commercial formats and implementation said "Undoubtedly, the feel-good factor of Team GB's medal success has had a direct impact in uplifting sales". So much so that in the week ending August 4th internet based sales shot up by 44.3% on the previous year and with sales of London 2012 merchandise up by 51% on the previous week.
This may go some way to showing what effect the Olympics may have had to the retail market, specifically online retail, but with a plateau before they began and with them now being over, there is a real risk that online sales may be slow for the next quarter until the rush leading up to Christmas begins where online sales across the board are set to hit their highest point of the year.
Written by Jason John Mills