For those of you joining us for the first time, Commerce Pulse is a quarterly event that highlights data we gather from hundreds of brands and retailers around the world. From this data, we're able to glean insights into the state of commerce today and what we can expect in the future.
If you missed the event, you can still watch the recording on demand, or keep reading for a recap of the highlights.
Despite the back-to-school season and an improvement in consumer sentiment, the online economy continues to face challenges with inflation, resulting in a decline in sales. This is because online shoppers have grown more accustomed to waiting for discounts, impacting overall sales performance.
Economic uncertainties are still affecting the European Market, and Summer has been a negative quarter overall. Despite this "lumpy" state of the market, great opportunities are still awaited for the rest of the year!
The problems we see in Q1 results point to something else as well — the customer experience is not where it needs to be. By many measures, customers are less engaged and more frustrated than they have been in a long while. As an industry, we have failed to keep up with the transition to mobile and to make the user experience as it needs to be.
To nobody’s surprise, inflation and the overall economic environment significantly impacted consumer confidence in the last quarter of 2022. What was surprising, though, was that Europe still saw strong sales results during the holiday season, with a 9% sales bump year-over-year (YoY).
“Economic uncertainty is on top of consumers’ minds,” said Amy, which is a consistent theme from the previous quarter. However, there was a surprise surge in promotions and sales among retailers, likely because as they had to raise prices, they turned to offering promotions as a way to stimulate demand.
There are a lot of people saying the e-commerce boom is over. While the e-commerce boom has evened out and slowed to more of a pre-pandemic growth rate, we need to be careful not to read too much into these numbers. We got kind of addicted to these massive growth numbers during the pandemic, and we need to put that into context as well.
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