Hell Week
by Andrew on 06/10/08 at 4:24 pm
4 comments
September 21 to September 27 2008 will go down in South African retail history as one of the worst weeks ever. The following forces collided to create a “perfect storm”:
- A massive change in our government, including replacing our president, and for a day or so the fear that our much-loved finance minister was out as well.
- The world’s economy and banking system falling to pieces literally overnight. Fear of the next “great depression” gripped everyone who read a paper or watched the news. The Rand and the JSE have fallen about 10% since the start of that week.
- A Wednesday public holiday meant that half of our population took leave on Monday/Tuesday, and the other half took off Thursday/Friday. Government employees took off the whole week.
- School holidays started.
- The Western Cape announced the wettest and coldest winter in over 50 years. September alone experienced 3 times the average rainfall. Weather is often blamed for retail results.
We spoke to a few friends in retail who said that September 2008 was possibly their worst month ever, with the last week being the real killer. I checked the Yuppiechef stats and found this:
Site Visitors
Conversion Rate (percentage of people who bought something)
As the graphs show, the week in question brought roughly the same number of visitors to Yuppiechef as the weeks on either side, but the conversion rate was almost a third of a “normal” week. This means that people still browsed in Hell Week, but the chaos in the world caused most of us to act like deers caught in the headlights, not able to reach into our wallets to take out the credit card.
Fortunately South African shoppers are pretty resiliant, and we bounce back quickly. But it’s still not a picnic if you own a small business and you’re trying to keep afloat. If you’re hanging in there, keep it up! There are plenty of businesses in exactly the same position as you, and hopefully we can all keep going long enough to get through this dip.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew.
Nic
Oct 6th, 2008
Strange, it seems as though SA Rocks readers are psychic because I experienced a massive (the biggest in a year) drop in traffic the two weeks preceding these events. Then it was straight back up as if the events caused people to research, inform themselves and get involved.
Christian Debt Relief
Oct 6th, 2008
Andrew, thanks for the upbeat post on an otherwise dreadful day. You were able to put a smile on my face. Thanks!
Justin
Oct 7th, 2008
We found pretty much the same thing – conversion rates dont change much…just the amount of traffic decreased.
Maybe post the analytics report showing the difference between the same timeperiod last month?
Marc
Oct 7th, 2008
We have a few campaigns running in the UK and while traffic has remained steady, conversions were very low in Sep in general and are slowly fighting back up for the lower value items. The higher value items (roughly £200) are still experiencing low conversions