 Anchor:
British retailers are preparing for a difficult Christmas as recent figures reveal the first successive monthly fall in overall sales for nearly 14 years. However internet retailers are still hopeful of good sales in the run up to Christmas.
Our reporter Zhang Wan has the story.
Reporter:
Monday December 8th was dubbed 'Mega Monday' and was expected to be the biggest date for online shopping. Play.com is one of the most popular sites for online shoppers, specializing in CDs and DVDs. Stuart Rowe is Managing Director for Play.com.
"Mega Monday is hugely busy. It's a day that we plan for all year, whether it's our Systems Department or our Marketing Department and we're looking to take up to seven hundred and fifty orders a minute"
Sales figures from the department store 'John Lewis' in the first weekend of December offered some hope after the store reported improved Christmas trading and said it had been a record week for online shopping.
Its sales for the week to Saturday December 6th were down 6.7% on a year earlier in a marked improvement on the rate of around 13% seen during much of November.
Laurie Basannova says she buys almost everything on the web.
"All my food shopping, clothes, shoes, some toiletries, vitamins, books, CDs, gifts, cards, birthday cards...get those sent out. Pretty much anything that goes really."
A recent survey by Deutsche Card Services, a member of Deutsche Bank Group, says that women now account for more than half of all purchases made online.
The survey also revealed that women prefer Wednesdays while Mondays are men's favourite shopping days.
Online stores are often an invaluable tool for time-constrained employees. Peter Martinlechner is an Internet retailing banker.
"People are buying on the internet at lunchtimes and clearly employers are either making a sensible judgment of saying 'well that's a good thing for them to do because if it's ten or fifteen minutes at lunchtime it's probably better than them spending an hour, hour and a half, going out to try and find the present that they're looking to buy"
However the online shopping sector also showed it is not immune to the consumer spending slump.
Online sales growth slowed sharply from about 16% year-on-year in October, to about 9% last month, according to a latest Retail Sales Monitor of the British Retail Consortium.
Retailers both on the high street and online must be hoping that customers have been putting off Christmas shopping ¨C and not cancelling it completely.
For China Drive, I am Zhang Wan.
|
