eCommerce Trends to Watch This Holiday Season
Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.
At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.
But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.
Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.
What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buyingnot browsingbehavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.
Based on last years pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.
This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.
Well be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.
When Will The Fed Increase Interest Rates
Palos Verdes, CA. There is an old German saying “postponed but not nullified”. This is true for the Feds decision to keep its central bank rates unchanged in September and October. The Feds vote against hiking rates surprised everyone less than did the reasons why.
It seems the bench line of the unemployment rate has been downgraded in favor of actual inflation. This approach has caused some uncertainty in the real estate markets for the following reasons:
1) The Fed always runs the risk of getting it wrong, as it might constitute either too early or too late a move. To minimize any adverse impact, they create frameworks with policy objectives that are linked to intermediate targets. This does not eliminate uncertainty, but it at least reduces it as to how the Fed will react to future events. This reaction function cannot, and should not be, cast in stone, as the links from intermediate targets to policy goals are themselves uncertain and subject to change.
2) The Feds mandate is to create maximum employment with stable prices, which they define as 2% inflation. Fed officials have argued that they cant wait for actual inflation to breach the 2% level, given the long and variable lags from policy to prices. As a result, they have often indicated that they will look out for signals of future inflation, the first being the unemployment rate, and use this as the intermediate target for setting rates.
According to economist Robert Stammers, interest rates, especially the rates on interbank exchanges have a profound effect on the value of income-producing real estate. Because the influence of interest rates on an individual’s ability to purchase residential properties is so profound, many people incorrectly assume that the only deciding factor is in the mortgage rate. However, mortgage rates are a major factor for influencing property values. Because interest rates also affect capital flows, the supply and demand for capital and investors’ required rates of return on investment, interest rates will drive property prices in a variety of ways.
Economist Stammers go on to say to understand how government-influenced interest rates, capital flows and financing rates affect property values, you should have a basic understanding of the income approach to real estate values. The income approach provided by appraisers of income rental properties is the discounted cash flow analysis.
In simple terms, the valuation starts by forecasting property income, which takes the form of anticipated rental income. Then, by taking all property-level costs, including the financing cost, the analyst arrives at the net operating income (NOI), or cash flow remaining after all operating expenses.
By subtracting all capital costs, as well as any investment capital to maintain or repair the property and other non-property-specific expenses from NOI, the result is the net cash flow available to investors. By discounting the cash flow stream for a given investment period, the property value is determined.
Demand for real estate is related to changes in affordability. The fewer people able to purchase homes, the greater the demand for rentals and vice versa. Another important factor affecting supply and demand is the availability and cost of mortgage money. Interest rates play an important role in determining demand.
In the final analysis, w still believe that Fed action will take place during the coming winter season.
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