E-retailers book an 18% revenue increase for Q3

The increase points to a healthy holiday shopping season, MarketLive says.

Online revenue increased 18.14% year over year in the third quarter for more than 100 retailer clients of e-commerce technology provider MarketLive Inc. MarketLive did not provide actual revenue figures.

For the three months ending Sept. 30, visits to the e-commerce sites increased 15.95% year over year, which the company says bodes well for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

"Merchants are in a strong position to take advantage of holiday opportunities," the company writes in its analysis of the third quarter performance of clients included in the MarketLive Performance Index. The index compares only retailers that were a client of MarketLive in both the recent quarter and the same quarter a year earlier, and that agree to provide MarketLive with access to analytics data.

The index also revealed:

• The conversion rate improved by 13.18% year over year to 4.55%.
• The cart abandonment rate dropped to 61.48% in Q3 from 62.25% a year ago.
• The average order size during the quarter stood at $147.28. Year-over-year comparison data were not available.
• 35.69% of site traffic came from search engines, 30.01% from direct traffic and 2.88% from social networks. The remaining 31.42% of traffic came from other sources, but MarketLive did not provide details.
• The engagement rate-the percentage of site visitors who place items in a shopping cart-was 10.42%, up from 9.15% a year ago.

                                                                                Allison Enright, Senior Editor - Internet Retailer

What this means for FSI is that our halls will be decked with a variety of new product arrivals and lots of orders to process, pack and ship with our usual Holiday cheer.  We would love to help your business to deliver its 2011 Holiday merchandise or campaigns to market, so just give us a call!