Ten years on: the changing face of Christmas consumption

By: Scott Allen - 09/12/2013

Scott is the Marketing Director for Colt's enterprise business focussing on awareness, demand generation and sales enablement. He has held a number of senior marketing positions in the pan-European enterprise space, as well as launching several successful start-up brands.

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Over the last decade online retail has become dwarfed by a succession of record-breaking statistics. By 2012, 115m visits to UK shopping websites were made on one day alone. That day was 3 December, dubbed Mega Monday or sometimes Cyber Monday. The first Monday of December has become the busiest pre-Christmas, web shopping day of the year. Last year, £10,000 worth of goods were sold per second, Visa processed 6.8m credit card transactions and a total of £465m was spent – the equivalent to a quarter of the entire Christmas spend a decade earlier.

The consequence of all of this activity is a substantial peak in web traffic for eCommerce businesses, not seen at other times of the year. For those providing the infrastructure that supports the business environment it presents an exciting opportunity. As the Christmas lights are switched on across European cities, so companies such as Colt must ensure that the Internet does not go dark.

The changing face of Christmas consumption – a new network model?

A key challenge faces retailers and the IT infrastructure supporting them – accommodating large spikes in traffic and dealing with an increasing number of shoppers using mobile phones.

Users will be familiar with periods of “patchy” internet access. You’ve probably experienced that when the kids get home from school or on a Friday when everybody is working from home. The preferred solution is to provide “uncontended and guaranteed” bandwidth.

Operators and businesses have traditionally chosen one of two options. They will build their network’s access to the internet in a way that caters for the maximum level of business that they are expecting. Or they won’t. They rely, instead, on the customer’s desire to do business despite latency issues, increasingly risky in a world of consumers with quick moving fingers.

There is an emerging third alternative – adoption of cloud services so that capacity can be scaled up and down as demand requires. The attraction of this model is clear: for the shopper it means an uninterrupted shopping experience; for the retailer it is the most cost efficient way of handling traffic peaks and troughs, avoiding the need to pay for capacity when that capacity is not being used.

The need for a flexible service infrastructure is exemplified by Leroy Merlin who has proved that it is actually possible through technology to provide the best support for its customers with information and know how. Colt manages Leroy Merlin’s IT services so that Europe’s largest do-it-yourself (DIY) retailer can focus on what it’s good at – serving the customer.

Sergio Casado Castejón, Technology and Innovation Manager for Leroy Merlin, has a clear view that: “Customer retention and their reputation depends on IT reliability. If customers cannot access product information when they arrive, they may not return to us.”

Creating the foundations for the changing face of retail

As we look into the future, nobody can forecast what customers are going to need next. Current stats show, the demographics and patterns of consumption are constantly changing. One thing however remains unchanged: the customer is king. Meaning the retailers – and the IT infrastructure supporting their services – must constantly seek to give all types of customers, from traditionalists to online fans, the shopping experience they feel they deserve.

Retailers will continue to innovate and evolve the digital customer experience both in-store and on-line. Delivery of that experience will need to be secure, seamless, on-demand and scalable to cope with an exponential growth in data.

In the next ten years I’ve no doubt elastic IT infrastructure - from network to data centre to compute power and storage - will become THE enabler for the retail business of the future.


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