This month we introduce Industry Insight, courtesy of NextAction, a Westminster, CO-based database marketing services provider. Each month NextAction will share sales and channel data compiled from more than 1,100 multichannel merchants. This information can help you benchmark your business and keep an eye on market-segment trends.
Here, NextAction looks at average order sizes and sales per channel for participating merchants in July 2006. Note: The breakdown between catalog and Web sales is based on order channel, not promotional channel. If a customer received a print catalog that spurred him to place his order online, that order will be categorized as a Web order.
July 2006
Overall, the catalog is still more popular than the Web as an order channel, with 58% of orders coming via the phone or mail compared with 42% online. (Because a significant portion of the companies tracked do not have stores, retail data were excluded from the results.) Among buyers of children’s merchandise, however, the Web is the favored channel, with nearly two-thirds of orders being placed online. According to NextAction, this could be a result of the younger age of these buyers.
But while more orders were placed via catalog, the average Web order size was 50% higher, at $113, than the average catalog order. Here again, the children’s merchandise category proved an exception, with the average catalog order about 7% larger than the average Web order. 