Has everyone stopped buying this Christmas

[chris ashdown]

Last year, at this time I was overloaded with orders, this year they are much less maybe 30% down. November was great but this month verry slow

Is it my sites, or are we all in the same boat?

[Mike Hughes]

For me this month's running about 40% up over last year and 50% up (based on month to date) over November. Fairly similar pattern to last year and from what I hear about in line with the general market.

Sounds like you might have some new competition or are loosing visibility somewhere.

If it's stronger competition, then you might see the same number of visitors but a lower conversion rate.

It it's less visibility then the number of visitors is probably down.

Mike

[pinbrook]

Our selling kicked off mid November, and it still at that level.

However we will close online ordering on Monday. I hate last minute orders, they are always for items which we haven't got enough stock, or they get lost/delayed in the post

[Miranda Stamp]

Bizzarely we have been very busy aup to and including this week, normally by now everyone has stopped buying nappies and has focused on Christmas, but we had a very last minute rush today, in fact all this week we have been as busy as normal. However there is nothing decent on TV tonight and no-one has ordered a thing (we get most of our orders after the kids are in bed from 7pm-9pm), so yes we've slowed down now. Good job too as we have year end stock take to do *and* we're moving out of my house & down the road to premises , bliss I get my house back for Christmas!

[ajfish]

I think competition is the key here for us. Our sales grew 10% month on month, every month for 4 years until earlier this year. Then it became apparent that a lot of people were jumping on the e-commerce band wagon. I don't know if it was coincidence, but the down turn in the IT industry probably meant there were a lot of out of work IT people who were thinking "Hmm I know I'll set up a web site, now what can I sell? I know batteries, everyone needs batteries" We discovered last year that at least 3 other companies had plagarised large sections of our first site (now very dated) at www.watchbattery.co.uk, but because this features very well in Google, I guess they thought they could get good rankings by literally just copying pages! Another individual ordered from us and copied our invoices and confirmation email almost to the letter. We have managed to stay ahead keeping our current small team by selling a wider range of products, but it's much harder now to compete with the "man in the shed" who may not even be VAT registered and has very low overheads. Our conversion rate is still 10% which I have been told is very good for an e-commerce site, so the trick is always to get people to visit your site.
So what was the question?... oh yes, people are still ordering for Christmas - getting the batteries for all of those toys, but the competition is definitely a factor for us. January is one of our best months - Guess a lot of parents are getting "Mum, Dad, my remote control car has stopped working"
Season Greetings to all the other forum members....
Andrew

[RussellPing]

Ours has been growing for about 9 months and only slowed down on Tuesday, we're getting a few people order.