Alright people! I have few numbers for you to crunch and establish a link between your business and your “new” favourite customers. These numerics have been taken from a NAB report (for 2012) to indicate how aussies are choosing to shop and spend.
So firstly, the online retail has picked up again after falling a little around late 2011, but still has a long way to go. In 2012;
Online sales grew 26% – 12.3billion
Traditional or non-online sales grew only 2.6% – 221billion
This shows we need that NBN thingy up and running now and not in the next ten years (by which time we will all be ancient history).
But this also means that there is a lot of space for small businesses to grow online and capture more attention and market.
The next 2012 stat might make you a little happy – domestic retailers are outselling international ones. Domestic retailers contributed to 74% of total online sales. Damn that sounds sexy!
Domestic retail sales growth – 28%
International retail sales growth – 22%
This also suggests that mentioning that you are an aussie owned and operated company, might get you the intial sales you need.
Now I don’t want to sound condescending here, but older people have caught up with us (young ones) in terms of online spending. People in their 30’s and 40’s are the ones driving growth in online retail. Its an important demographic of your target audience and should be addressed accordingly.
Moving on to geographics. Off course, NSW and Victoria are still the two highest contributing states to online retail (76%) in terms of number of customers and subsequent spending. But its WA and NT that are showing the most growth and a swift one as well (36%). And once again the people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s are the ones leading the charge in these states.
Although it is worthwhile considering that the growth in WA might be linked with the mining boom, but with many claiming the mining boom to be over, we might see some considerable changes in these figures in 2013.
So for now, if the delivery/postage section on your website or any form of your business says “please allow few extra days for delivery to regional areas”, you might be losing some very important customers.
The report further classifies some markets according to sectors:
Sector one – online auctions, department stores, fashion, cosmetics and variety stores;
Sector two – home, furniture, appliances and electronics;
Sector three – recreation, toys, games and hobbies, music, movies and books; and
Sector four – groceries, liquor and specialised food
Apart from sector 2, every sector showed a consistent growth. Sector 2 mainly consists of white goods that people are mostly happy to buy in retail stores to get a good touch and feel. Besides, its getting very hard to create profit margins with electronics due to the enormous rise in competition both locally and internationally. You ought to have a very distinctive/creative product to achieve high margins (like dyson).
Lastly, under 30’s (like us) are spending more time with sectors 1 & 3 (ebay, gaming consoles, amazon & the list goes on) whereas older people spend more time with sector 4 (buying the everyday necessities like alcohol).
These demographics are very important in categorizing the target market of our business and should be incorporated into the marketing strategy.
I will try and have some international infographics for my next blog entry.
In the meantime, I would love to know your comments!
Saga of my first Startup 