Data is Free

Comscore's Online Retailing Report for Q1 '09 was released today. The results are incredibly sobering. Online spending is down 10% for people making under $50k. But the surprising thing is that it is only up 3% for people making more than $100k, and 2% for people making between $50k and $99k. Typically that group drives a great deal of online retail as they drive 80% of online retail.

Much of this decline can be attributed to the drop in spending for people over the age of 45 who, having seen their net worth pummeled in the market while also facing retirements and/or kids nearing college age, have basically stopped spending.

Diving a bit deeper, the only areas to experience any growth were Sports and Fitness and home entertainment options. I'd love to know what is driving the growth in sports/fitness spending. Are people trying to stay healthy and de-stress? Would love to know more.


As should be expected in our current economic times, discounts and coupons are incredibly popular. In fact, Comscore indicated in their presentation that coupon sites are experiencing a 15 year high in traffic. In fact, coupon sites are second only to search in importance for online shoppers. That's a fascinating stat given the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in search, online shopping comparison sites, and auction sites. I seem to recall that Microsoft recently bought Ciao, an online shopping comparison site, for nearly $US 500 M.


The following chart shows the amazing growth of visits to coupon sites.


What's also astonishing is that most people still get their coupons from the Sunday paper with a minority getting coupons online. So, while coupons are a huge source of information for online shoppers, people are getting their coupons from the paper?


Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't there a massive opportunity for online retailers and merchants to drive sales and customer retention by investing a greater portion of their marketing budgets and product marketing efforts in online coupons and rebates? Moreover, isn't there a great opportunity to link giving consumers coupons in exchange for getting them to take a survey, agreeing to have their behaviors targeted online?

I know coupons aren't seen as being "cool," but they work to drive sales into a certain segment of the population that is price sensitive - which right not includes everyone. And given the opportunity to link the receiving a coupon to giving up some demographic or behavioral data, doing online coupons seems like a no-brainer.