In another indication that the e-retailing market is coming back to life, fourth-quarter same-store sales for MarketLive Inc. e-retail clients grew 8.54% over Q4 2008 sales, MarketLive, a provider of e-commerce technology and services, tells Internet Retailer. The boost in the fourth quarter was enough to allow e-retailers to report a year of flat, rather than declining, sales, reports the MarketLive Performance Index. Q1 sales were down 6%, while Q2 and Q3 sales were down 2% each.
“We saw a rebound in consumer spending in the fourth quarter,” Mark Pierce, MarketLive CEO, says. “More consumers continue to connect via the web. We saw a drastic change in visits, year over year, and quarter over quarter.”
In the fourth quarter, same-store visits to MarketLive clients were up 14.45%, while year-over-year visits were up 9.60%.
For the holiday period of Nov. 23 (the Monday before Thanksgiving) to Dec. 23, same-store revenue was up 5.62%, while visits were up 20.82%.
Pierce says MarketLive saw across its base greater emphasis on search engine optimization, niche products and personalized, segmented e-mail marketing. One indication of the success of search engine optimization was the so-called “one and out” rate, the percentage of customers who came in via a search engine, viewed one page and then returned quickly to the search engine. For the year, the one-and-out rate was down 10.65%. For the quarter it was down 6.39% and for the holiday period, down 2.60%.
MarketLive reports a big disparity between the 10 highest-performing clients and the rest of the client base. The top 10 in terms of sales growth during the holiday period experienced growth of 73.52% in revenue and 42.60% in visits. Their conversion rate was down 3.45% vs. down 7.69% for all retail clients.
For the year, sales for all retailers in the MarketLive Performance Index were flat, visits were up 9.60% and conversion rates were up 6.09%. The top 10’s sales were up 50.27%, visits up 28.09% and conversion rates up 22.52%.
While Pierce expects retailers to continue to apply in 2010 the lessons they learned in 2009, he also expects that the rebound in consumer spending will encourage retailers to start experimenting again. “I expect targeted experimentation with a return to creation of micro-sites or of multi-sites targeted at finer customer groups,” he says.
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