Online helps the high street to stay steady

Online has often been blamed for the plight of the high street in recent years. The case is usually made that consumers are forsaking traditional shops as they search for greater convenience and lower prices online, a trajectory that will inevitably lead to the death of the high street.

Here on Internet Retailing we’ve taken a different approach, championing the cause of the shop and its vital role in the even-more-convenient multichannel sales. And new research from the Local Data Company, which we cover in today’s newsletter, appears to support that thesis. Find out more in the story below.

In today’s newsletter we also report on how ecommerce is affecting the way we pay, through a new report from the Payments Council. We report on retailers including Mobile Fun while we also bring you an account of the leading US retail show the NRF. Our previews of our own annual expo, IRX 2013, concentrate on the Online Merchandising and Selling Conference, while we also feature an interview with Dressipi co-founder and chief executive Sarah McVittie, who is speaking in our conference stream at the event.

And we’re celebrating this week because we’ve surpassed the 10,000 mark with our Twitter followers, so just a quick note to say thank your all for engaging, sharing, retweeting and if you don’t already follow us, check out @etail for the latest updates from the Internet Retailing team.


We have some upcoming Internet Retailing webinars to flag up this week. As always, it’s free to attend our webinars, and you can find out more on our webinar page, where you can also watch earlier events that you may have missed.

On February 20, at 11am, Matthew Curry of Lovehoney and Chris Edge of SLI Systems join us for a webinar, If they can’t find it they can’t buy it – importance of site search for online retailers. During the session the two speakers will examine how site search is used on the Lovehoney site, while Chris Edge, head of customer success UK at SLI, will also give broad advice on best practice use. To find out more about this webinar and to register, click here.

And on February 28 at 11am, we’ll be joined by Tim Pickard, chief strategist at NewVoiceMedia and Martin Hill-Wilson, chief executive of Brainfood and a long-standing member of the UK customer service community, for a discussion on how retailers can connect their CRM data with telephony to recognize and respond to individual customer situations and so offer a truly personalised customer experience, in Customer experience: making it personal. For more information and to register, click here.

Also on February 28, we have a briefing seminar around our recent returns research. The research, in association with Fits.me, Collect+ and Amethyst Group, focused on joined-up returns for multichannel retailers. The results were first unveiled in a webinar last week that you can catch up on here. And we’ll be discussing them at more length at the Research Briefing Seminar, at the Glaziers Hall, London between 9.30am and 11.30am that day. For more information click here.

Today’s stories

Online shopping helps the high street to fight back

Ecommerce drives the pace of change in the way we pay, with the decade of mobile payments now ahead

IRX 2013 THE INDEPTH VIEW The Online Merchandising and Selling Conference

IRX 2013 PREVIEW Interview with Sarah McVittie of Dressipi

Mobile Fun expands internationally, with sights set on global leadership

NRF – The show report