The latest batch of data is out from the BRC. The first point is that the high street continues to suffer and suffer a lot. On a like for like basis they report that sales have shrunk 0.6% since last year. This is extraordinarily bad and many retailers will be anxiously looking to the Christmas period to drag them out of the mire. Costs are most certainly not decreasing at 0.6% — as for margins, don’t even go there. It’s tough, really tough to sell things in shops nowadays.

Against this background, it would be remarkable if the growth rates in ecommerce were unaffected. But from where I;m sitting it looks as though the impact is pretty modest. The year on year growth rate to October 2010 (according to the BRC) was 12.8%. This year they report the growth rates reducing to 11.5%, but last month’s figures was 10.1%. I don’t know so much about the robustness of their data but it would be hard to see these variations as being so far off the margin of error.

Averages are averages though and there are clearly winners and losers – a key winner seems to be John Lewis, they report that their figures were up 20.6%. They report that “It’s beginning to look like Christmas”. Well they do have £6m to spend on their Christmas advert…

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