In today’s current business environment a good website is a necessity, this is because a website is a platform from which many different marketing strategies can be launched from and is an efficient way to increase customer satisfaction. Almost all businesses now have an online platform which some businesses have chosen to place at the center of their structure, choosing e-commerce as their principal form of trading, examples of this type of business include the likes of Amazon, eBay and Alibaba.
So, when looking at this in the context of the sportswear industry one question that ran through my mind was “just how important is a website for companies in the sportswear sector in terms of sales and how are they looking to make use of their websites going forward?”
So obviously the biggest impact a website is going to have on sales is through e-commerce. This is the process of selling products over the internet, and is a type of retail selling which has seen strong growth over the last few years. In the UK in 2015 77% of all internet users made a purchase online, this encouraged internet sales to grow by 16.2% in that year with a prediction made in 2016 that it would grow a further 14.9%. Therefore as you can see e-commerce is a high growth method of sale which holds a lot of opportunity in the future.
But how true is this of the sportswear sector? Looking at some of the main brands like Puma and Under Armour it would seem that the general figures appear to hold as true for the sportswear industry as it would any other. The statistics put forward by Puma for the first quarter of 2016 showed that their own operated retail sale, which includes e-commerce, accounted for 18.6% of their total sales, a growth a growth of 15.1%, which is fairly similar to the figures for general retail sale.