Online Retail Sales Strong Despite Recession

While the economy may look pretty bleak and online ad revenue is down, there is good news when it comes to ecommerce.  Why? Well, online retail sales were up in the first quarter of 2009.

A survey conducted by Shop.org and Forrester in early April noted that almost sixty percent of retailers reported that their online sales increased during this time period.  In this study, a total of eighty retailers participated. Other findings discovered that thirteen percent of the online retailers noted that business remained flat – in other words, their business did not decrease at all due to the recession.

What Types of Businesses Do Particularly Well?

Larger retailers, those business earning $100 million dollars in online annual sales in particular, did quite well – as a full eighty-seven percent of these retailers noted an increase in online revenue.  However, about half of the smaller retailers, those businesses that earn $10 million and below in sales) and medium sized businesses, online businesses that earn $10 million to $100 million per year, reported an increase in sales as well.

Almost seventy percent of brand name manufacturers and multichannel retailers noted their sales increased during the first quarter of 2009.  Lastly, forty percent of online retailers reported an increase in sales during this time period.  Not bad at all!

Etsy.com Flourishes During This Downturn

All that said, there are certain businesses that are flourishing during this economic downturn.  One stand out is Etsy.com.  In fact, in December of 2008, Etsy sold $12.9 million dollars worth of items from their website. Moreover, the site had 411 million page views and 165,000 new Etsy accounts were created in December.  In January and February of 2009, the website sold $10 million and $10.3 million worth of items respectively.  In particular, the vintage category is doing really well on the Etsy site.

Marketing at Etsy.com

As far as marketing goes, the largest source of traffic to the site is derived from word-of-mouth advertising.  Etsy also has a cooperative subsidized advertising program.  Moreover, the company also as an Ad Words expert, recently hired an email marketing expert on its staff and have been revamping their site to make it more SEM and SEO friendly.  The company is also taking advantage of the ever popular social media marketing route.  In fact, Twitter is the third-largest source of Etsy’s traffic at present.

All in all, while many brick and mortar businesses languish during this recession, many online businesses continue to prosper.