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Marks & Spencer and Debenhams sales
November 24, 2008
As many had predicted, the pre-Christmas sales and discount offers started in earnest last week, with Marks & Spencer and Debenhams amongst the high profile names offering reductions both on the high street and online. As you would expect, both retailers achieved a significant boost in traffic, with M&S in particular doing extremely well. On November 19th marksandspencer.com was the third most visited retail website in the UK (behind eBay and Amazon), accounting for 1 in every 33 visits to our Shopping and Classifieds category.
Both websites experienced an increase in average visit time at the end of last week. For M&S this exceeded 14 minutes - twice the usual figure - while Debenhams reached 11 minutes. Unfortunately the massive spike in traffic crashed the Debenhams homepage, which led to an increase in the amount of traffic it ‘leaked’ to other retailers. On November 18th 33.2% of Debenhams’s downstream traffic went to other retailers, but by the 22nd (Saturday) this had increased to 46.9%. Looking at the top individual retail websites that received traffic from debenhams.com last week, the biggest beneficiaries were M&S (which accounted for 4.6% of downstream visits, up from 2.8% the previous week), Next (2.2%), and John Lewis (1.7%).
Marks and Spencer’s downstream data tells a quite different story. Last week just 25.1% of its downstream traffic went to other retail websites, but this wasn’t solely due to the success of its sale. Over a third (36.3%) went to eCustomerOpinions.com, a survey website run by eDigitalResponse. M&S obviously chose to take advantage of its surge in traffic to carry out some valuable customer research, and it looks like it collected a lot of data! As the chart below illustrates, the survey website experienced a massive record spike in traffic last week.
Update (Monday afternoon)
Here are a couple of additional data points that may be of interest. Firstly, we spoke to our colleagues at Experian Footfall to see what impact these events had on the high street. Here's a quote from Anita Sharma Manan, a Senior Quantitative Analyst at Footfall:
"The Preliminary Index year-on-year stats of Thursday 20th November 2008 compared to the same Thursday last year (21st November 2007)has shown a percentage growth of +5.47%. The spectacular ‘one off’ events held by major department stores has stimulated Footfall into the shopping centres benefiting retailers. Although these are just initial stats, and the actuals are yet to be released, it’s a good indication showing how much impact these activities in retail have had."
Secondly, in response to one of the comment's below here's a charting comparing the performance of M&S and Debenhams with their rivals John Lewis, Littlewoods, House of Fraser and BHS.
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:30 AM
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In Categories Christmas | Economy | Fashion | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
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Comments
Interesting that M&S was able to handle a much bigger spike in traffic.
Posted by G Charlton | November 24, 2008 05:11 PM
Thanks for the comment, Richard.
To answer your first question I've added a new chart to the original post. This illustrates weekly UK Internet traffic to M&S, Debenhams, John Lewis, Littlewoods, House of Fraiser and BHS. As you can see, both M&S and Debenhams experienced a much bigger spike in traffic than their competitors last week.
Regards, Robin.
Posted by Robin Goad | November 24, 2008 05:28 PM
Thanks Robin, it's very interesting that the competitor lines are so flat. Potentially the increase in the downstream traffic to the competitor sites was counterbalanced by the visitors that M&S and Debenhams acquired from them in the same period.
Posted by Richard Hartigan | November 24, 2008 05:54 PM
Very interesting. Here's my initial thoughts:
1) The downstream traffic information indicates that competitors of M&S and in particular Debenhams may also have experienced peaks in traffic over this period. It can also be assumed that their respective sales increased. This is without having to offer such dramatic discounts to product which may lead some to believe that it is better not to react to competitors blitz promotions.
2) Seeing as M&S had a primary objective to generate sales during this period I am surprised they did not switch the survey off. This may have distracted potential customers away from purchase and makes some of their quantitative analytics less effective. They would also be acquiring responses from a sample that is less than typical.
Posted by Richard Hartigan | November 24, 2008 01:33 PM