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January 18, 2011

Pre-Christmas snow boosts online sales by 12 per cent

Small businesses selling online increased their revenue by 12 per cent in the three months to Christmas on the same period in 2009, but could have made bigger gains if they had made contingency plans for the bad weather, research from Actinic has found.

Actinic marketing manager, Simon Armstrong, said: “Many consumers went for the convenience of ordering online, so the burden of fulfilling the order was passed to the online trader. Some websites saw an increase in sales because the snow meant people physically couldn’t get out to go shopping.”

He added that small firms could have boosted their sales even further by being better prepared for the bad weather. “It comes down to communicating effectively with your customers,” said Armstrong.

“Some businesses coped by putting information on their websites to indicate when they were expecting to clear any backlog in orders, and which areas of the country were likely to be affected,” he said. “Simple steps like that help reassure customers and encourage orders.”

Small-business owner Richard Smart of Smart Packaging said: “Our customer service queries increased over 400 per cent due to the unprecedented weather conditions.

“We found that by working very closely with our main carriers we were able to offer a dedicated weather help page on our website which indicated the ‘troubled’ postcodes – this helped customers when ordering,” he said.