Online shoppers spent £10.1bn in November as consumers continued to move away from the high-street to shop on their devices, according to latest figures.
Stats from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index, which tracks online sales from over 1000 e-retailers including Arcadia Group, ASOS.com and John Lewis, showed the highest ever monthly spend for online in November as sales surged 20 per cent on the same period last year. Sales were ahead of analysts forecasts of 15 per cent for November.
Fresh off the back of Aldi and Tesco selling out of their budget tablets, the electrical sector saw the highest ever month-on-month growth of 63 per cent.
E-tail conversion rate was 5.24 per cent which is the strongest figure since April 2009.
Chris Webster, VP, Head of Retail Consulting and Technology at Capgemini said the online market continued to drive growth of an otherwise struggling retail sector.
“These results are particularly strong and give a clear indication of what we can expect to see during the peak shopping weeks in December. With the introduction of great value tablet devices offering better accessibility than ever before, the sector is only set to rocket in 2014.”
Tina Spooner, Chief Information Officer at IMRG said the overall Index performance was “ahead of our expectations” during November. She said that the strong online growth recorded by the high street retailers is being driven by promotions of their multichannel offering.
Spooner said that almost half of retailers do not have a tablet optimised website and said it was likely that retailers would invest in tablets optimisation during 2014. Separate figures released yesterday showed that high-street footfall fell by the sharpest rate in 16 months.
The figures from the British Retail Consortium and Springboard also found overall footfall in November to be 2.9 per cent lower than a year ago.
