June Delivers the Lowest Monthly Decrease for Retail Sales in Over Five Years

People buy things online, but they go to brick and mortar retail stores for the shopping experience. The new data from the RetailNext Performance Pulse June 2019 report proves this very point.

Retail Performance Pulse June 2019

According to the report, June delivered the lowest monthly decrease in retail sales in more than five years. Coming in at -0.3%, this has been a great month for retailers. When you compare it to the -7.4%, -5.0%, -7.5%, -2.7%, and -5.0% of the previous five months, things are indeed looking up.

For small retailers who are competing with online retail giants, the news couldn’t be more welcomed. But in order to keep customers walking through their doors, they have to create and improve experiences customers want. This also comes at a time when online retailers are moving to the brick and mortar space.

This move is being driven by the overwhelming number of physical retail shoppers, which is much larger than online consumers.

The Market Share of Online Retailers

According to the Commerce Department, the total sales by online retailers now stands at almost 12% of the market share. The remaining 82% is still controlled by retailers in the real world.

However, the number is moving in the right direction for online retailers as they continue to gobble up more of the market share.

For brick and mortar retailers, it means they must adapt by providing the same or similar online services, while at the same time offering something their online counterparts can’t.

Retail Numbers for June

The RetailNext Performance Pulse is a year-over-year report. It identifies sales, traffic, transactions (TRN), conversion (CVR), percentage returns, average transition value (AVT), and shopper yield (SY).

The June report reveals shoppers are going to stores intending to buy. This has increased CVR, ATV, and SY by 0.3%, 4.7%, and 5.9% respectively year over year. The best numbers for the month of June came in during the last week.

RetailNext says the long weekend leading to the 4th of July is greatly responsible for this. And by the way, it also increased the sales for the holiday by 2.7%. Father’s Day was also responsible for peak days in June, delivering high sales, traffic, SY, and transactions.

The lowest day came in on the actual July 4th day, that is probably when people were celebrating instead of going shopping.

The Best Region

The weather plays a big role when it comes to retail sales. And the warm weather was responsible for a 5.6% increase in the Northeast and a 0.7% improvement in the South.

On the other hand, the West and Midwest were cooler than average, resulting in both regions experiencing a -2.7% decline in sales.

Traffic was down across the board in all regions, with the Midwest experiencing a -8.2% decline. But average transition value and shopper yield were up in all regions with an average of 4.7% and 5.9% respectively.

The Data Sources

RetailNext analyzed more than 7 million shopping trips for its Retail Performance Pulse June 2019 report. The data comes from specialty and larger format retail stores in the U.S. from Jun 2nd to Jul 6th, 2019. This includes regional performance in the West, Midwest, South, and Northeast.

You can download the full report here.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "June Delivers the Lowest Monthly Decrease for Retail Sales in Over Five Years" was first published on Small Business Trends