Specialty retail trends down for April compared to March
Declining traffic and early Easter to blame
The RetailNext platform is the source of a great deal of unique information about what's happening in bricks and mortar. Because the platform measures more than 400 million shopping trips a year, we can use RetailNext aggregated and anonymized metrics to reveal some key indicators of the retail industry's health. I recently sat down perform such an examination for North American specialty retail, looking at March and April 2013.
Specialty retailers saw a 5.5% average decline in sales along with a 5.9% decrease in traffic from March to April this year. Although conversion was up by 3.6% on average, representing a median increase of 2.4%, those who were purchasing were spending less as average transaction value (“ATV”) was down by 2.8%. The net result on sales per shopper was a 0.5% improvement from March to April.
April sales were unfavorably affected by the earlier Easter this year. We estimate that April would have experienced a 1.3% improvement in sales had the holiday fallen the second week of April or later.
When is the best time to shop? (Part 2 – Specialty Stores)
As promised, part 2 of our analysis is complete! We analyzed data from 5 major retailers to help you figure out the best time to shop at specialty stores. We hope you enjoy our findings - and save some valuable time.
When is the best time to shop? (Part 1 – Grocery Shopping)
We at RetailNext dove into some grocery and specialty store shopping data to see if we could figure out when is the best time to go shopping. This blog will focus solely on our grocery store analysis, with a specialty store analysis to follow.
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