Luxury brands net an ecommerce boost

Category: Views
15 Apr 2013
Read time: 1 MIN
Luxury spending online has undeniably increased over the last few years.

With American designer Tory Burch noting a massive ninety percent increased in e-commerce sales between 2010 and 2011. Ralph Lauren Media LLC, who jumped on the sales opportunity that the internet offered as early as 2000 - before many of its closest competitors - recorded a twenty-three percent increase over the same period.

It's not only spending that has grown, but also the ways in which consumers do that spending, and how they choose what they want to buy. Searches for retail brands and their products now occur on devices other than computers twenty-two percent of the time. In 2010, just forty-two percent of the brands studied for the L2 paper published in October 2012 had m-commerce enable mobile sites, a figure that jumped, last year, to seventy-three percent.

However, this same spike in enthusiasm is not shared by luxury branded apps. Up to eighty percent of smartphone users reported downloading various applications, yet only twelve percent of those were luxury brand related.

Flash sites, the bane of any SEO’s career, belong to twenty-three percent of the sixty-four brands that comprise the L2 study. This technology is clearly not the programme of choice for luxury companies - and for good reason; Flash sites recorded fifty-seven percent higher bounce rates than those using alternative, more refined script.

Client interaction has also increased between 2011 and 2012, with luxury brands initially emailing their customers 0.73 times a week, growing to 0.96 in just twelve months. Amongst these messages, fourteen percent of fashion companies are emailing consumers who have filled – and subsequently abandoned – an online shopping cart. This interaction keeps the client-company relationship alive, even after a consumer has changed their mind about a purchase, and perhaps the brand themselves.