James Roper – the big cheese over at IMRG - has been garnering masses of (print, broadcast and online) column inches about how, despite the downturn, online retail continues to grow at a pace that will leave other channels (i.e. bricks and mortar) green with envy.

Last week, Monday broke the record for online sales in the UK in a single day. But today will (we’re told) be even bigger.

It seems that online retail is expected to grow 20% this year, compared to 40% or so in previous years. Not bad given the flat to downright messy expectations in the High Street.

Happy shopping – I look forward to the figures!

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Alistair Darling?

As 2007 drew to a close, the UK e-commerce community celebrated a 54% year-on-year growth for the all-important fourth quarter, capping another year’s heady growth.

My how the world has changed since then. Still in the grip of the credit-fuelled boom, we’d come to expect these kinds of figures.

So what now? A forecast from IMRG, which just hit my inbox, suggests that this year growth will slow to 15%. Hold on a second… double digit growth? In the midst of an economic crisis Captain Darling memorably described as “the worst they’ve been in 60 years“?

I’d call that not such a bad outcome.

I’ll be even more interested to watch what happens following the central bank’s decision to slash interest rates to 2/3rds of where they were last week.

What is clear though is that online continues to show growth – both in sales and in marketing expenditure – even during the most severe downtown the economy has demonstrated in my lifetime.

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