We were recently evaluating our August results and saw an interesting data point that I wanted to share with readers. One of the measurements we follow closely is Same Store Sales – this basically compares the current year period (August 09 in this example) to the prior year (August 08) and strips out any customer adds/attritions so we get a clean apples to apples picture of what’s going on.
- ChannelAdvisor SSS – CA’s all in SSS trends – this counts ALL channels.
- eBay SSS – we’ve covered this
- Amazon SSS – Amazon SSS – this is primarily in the EGM (Electronics and General Merchandise) as we don’t have a lot of exposure to the media/video games categories.
- Comscore – Comscore regularly reports ecommerce trends and recently came out with a bearish dip for the August Back to School season showing – 3% y/y.
- eBaySSS fixed-price is growing at a really strong clip (40%+) vs. eBay auctions which are declining at 20%. Sellers have finally gotten the message and moving their business models to the FP30 format and abandoning the auction format in wholesale. The scale of the FP business is now large enough to start to move the needle on SSS – earlier in the year the FP growth was masked by the scale and decline of the auction business.
- Bing – Bing was running some nice promos in August and had the eBay cashback at 10%+ for most of august
- We’re annualizing the recession – Economics peg the start of the recession at March of 08, but it hit consumers (and consequently ecommerc spending) in the Aug/Sept timeframe.
- Anecdotely eBay seems to be doing more marketing – we noticed this first in the EU in Q2 and now it is trending up in the US.