Business Planning, Growth, IT, Local, Sales & Marketing, Website Strategy

In pictures: Australia’s five key online spending trends

November 29, 2012

If you’re selling your products online this Christmas, you should be gearing yourself up for boom time – research out this week shows that eCommerce sales will peak between December 7 and 10 this year.

However, even if your business is a seasonal one, you shouldn’t be thinking about online sales once a year. Much like pets, your website should be for life.

Figures released by NAB show that retail spending via the internet grew 26% to hit $12.3 billion in the year ending October 2012 – a period, let’s not forget, that has seen sluggish spending in bricks-and-mortar stores, prompting repeated warnings of retail apocalypse from whitegoods kingpin Gerry Harvey.

In some ways, the growth in the overall online sales figure undersells the importance of having a website. For start-ups, having an online presence – something that nearly a half of small businesses still lack – is an invaluable marketing tool, as well as a potential sales fulfilment channel.

We recently outlined the five key trends shaping online marketing in Australia. Now we’re digging into the sales figures to uncover Aussie online retail habits – who is spending, where, and on what.

Here are the five key online sales trends shaping Australia – click on each of the tabs below to see each of NAB’s illustrative graphs and charts:

1. Online growth has fired up again after a lull

Earlier this year, growth in online sales appeared to plateau. But it is on the rise again – 26% in the year to October compared to just 12% in the year to May.

It still has a long way to go to catch up with traditional retail – $12.3 billion versus $221 billion means that eCommerce has are share of just 5.6%.

But it’s clear that online sales, perhaps fuelled by interest rate cuts or increased public awareness of the savings available to them, are growing quickly again, while traditional retail remains relatively stagnant.

Growth in online sales vs. retail sales (%, yoy)