The credit crunch has caused problems for the high street recently in the UK but for online shopping, business is booming.
Christmas was a tough time for shops this year as more and more people are being affected by the current financial climate and many shops saw widespread profit losses, however, according to some recent market research, online shopping continued to do well, so well in fact that the ten biggest shopping sites on the web saw a huge 37% increase in visitors compared to last year.
Sales in many high street shops may have taken a steep drop, but online sales soared. Some high street stores suffered so much they had to close down some of their stores. This was the case with Marks & Spencer who reported poor Christmas trading and had to close down 27 stores and incur 1,230 job losses. However, they did see a silver lining when their online store saw a 46% increase in visitors in comparison to last year.
Another store to see an increase in customers who shop online was Littlewoods, they had the highest increase in online customers, with its site seeing visitors jump by 66%.
With online retail seen to have better prices and deals than the high street, the sales increases are being attributed to bargain hunters looking for a convenient way to find deals and they seem to find online shopping is the best way of doing this.
Alex Burmaster, at Nielsen Online, believes that with online shopping attracting over a third more customers at Christmas 2008 than Christmas 2007 did, the economy will have seen some benefit from online retail.
Although high street shops have seen a drop in sales,
online shopping is very popular at the moment.
Many online stores such as Littlewoods have seen increases in the amount of people who
shop online on their site.
Many people find
online shopping the best way for finding deals.
