Black Friday and Christmas 'unlikely to turn UK online retail's fortunes around'

IMRG is predicting UK online retail growth of just 2-3% during the Black Friday period.

This is the lowest forecast it has put out for a major online sales event before. Even worse, given the myriad problems retail is currently experiencing, there seems a very real possibility that sales could well be flat or even negative.

”It won’t have escaped many people’s notice that 2019 has been a pretty tough year for retail. The problems on the high street are well documented, but online sales growth has been very subdued too,” says Andy Mulcahy, Strategy and Insight Director at IMRG.

At the start of the year, IMRG predicted that the online retail market would grow by +9% in 2019. With nine months’ worth of data now in, the year-to-date figure (Jan-Sep in 2019 vs same period in 2018) is currently sitting at +4.9%.

IMRG is forecasting growth of 1-2% for December, which is even lower than it looks at first glance, as this is in comparison to the very weak growth of last year (just +3.6%), which was the lowest for the month of December ever.

“Given how weak demand has been throughout 2019, it seems highly unlikely that Black Friday and Christmas are going to turn retail’s fortunes around,” Mulcahy concludes.