Psyche website boosting high street sales

Jan 15 2008 by Sue Scott, Evening Gazette

CLICK happy consumers spent £84m online on Christmas Day, pushing British e-tail sales to a record high last year.

While leading retailers, shocked at the sheer scale of our digital avarice, came to terms with what they would later describe as a new consumer “phenomenon”, others forecast the death of the High Street.

But Middlesbrough’s most stylish retail entrepreneur has an alternative theory. Far from hammering another nail in the high street coffin, Psyche’s Steve Cochrane believes savvy salesmen could use the internet to create a Lazarus-like retail resurrection.

Sales through his fashion and home site in December were double that of last year, but at the same time he enjoyed his best ever festive footfall.

“We’ve only just realised that the website drives traffic into the store,” says Steve.

“Local people use our website to see if there’s anything new before they come in, so now we are prioritising putting on as many new deliveries in as many categories as possible and moving the site up the pecking order.”

The Psyche site generates 6% of all sales - just 0.5% short of the national average, (excluding non financial sales) over the web, according to the Office for National Statistics. But at the current rate of growth, the potential is massive, says Steve. “If it carries on like this, it could rival one of the departments in store.”

Sue Scott goes shopping in cyberspace and looks at the impact on business in this week’s nebusiness - see page 2.