The rich may inevitably get richer, but that’s not the case for the retailers and brands that sell them luxury goods.
Even online, which remains the fastest-growing sales channel for luxury merchandise, growth is not as robust as it once was. That’s one of the principal findings in Internet Retailer’s just-released report, Luxury on the Web: How global e-commerce is moving upscale. Some brands like Coach Inc. are pulling back on offering discounts online, lest they undercut their own stores’ prices, a that trend could further slow the growth of luxury e-commerce.
Overall, however, selling luxury goods online remains a success story. The 73 luxury retailers and brands covered in the global report increased their web sales by 16.7% in 2015 compared with 2014. That’s better than the 13.5% growth among the Top 1000 retailers in North America and just shy of the 16.9% growth among the 500 leading e-retailers in Europe.
Only the growth of Asia’s 500 leading web retailers significantly outpaced the growth in global luxury ecommerce, at 31.2%, a figure skewed by outsized growth in online shopping in China.
That’s solid progress, considering that global sales of luxury goods only grew 1% in constant-currency terms in 2015, according to consulting firm Bain & Co. Bain estimates online sales of luxury goods are growing at 15% annually, which suggests the leading e-commerce sites covered in this report are outpacing the market by a small margin. Collectively, the 73 luxury e-commerce sites in the report accounted for 4.5% of the global luxury personal goods market, which Bain estimates totaled 253 billion euros ($283 billion) in 2015.
Luxury on the Web is a 41-page downloadable PDF report, and the industry’s only e-commerce research that details all aspects of the burgeoning worldwide luxury e-commerce market including the market’s leaders, their challengers, what luxury products sell online, who the luxury shoppers are and what marketing techniques luxury e-retailers use to produce their impressive sales growth.
Included in the report are:
- Rankings, web sales, growth rates, average orders, conversion rates, merchant type and home countries for all 73 players
- Web sales and median and average growth rates of luxury e-retailing by region of the world
- Share of global e-luxury market by region
- Lists of the Top 10 and 10 fastest-growing luxury websites worldwide
- A digital marketing analysis of each e-retailer’s marketing programs
- Demographic metrics on the age, gender and income of the online luxury buyer
For more details or to order, click here.
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