January 13, 2010 (CAP Newswire) — Good news for online marketers in the U.S.: Shoppers are continuing their trend of making more purchases over the Internet than in retail stores.
“Although unseasonably cold weather and snowstorms kept shoppers out of the stores for much of December, it didn’t stop people from shopping online,” reports the Motley Fool financial blog. “comScore said that total holiday season retail e-commerce sales climbed 4% from a year ago to $29.1 Billion, with especially strong growth surrounding Black Friday weekend and the week leading up to Christmas.”
“While online sales only represent about 4% of total retail sales, the e-commerce channel has become an integral part of almost all retailers’ selling strategies … With social media, mobile commerce, and other fast-moving technologies enabling consumers ever more ways to shop and interact with each other and retailers, multi-channel integration will no doubt be at the forefront in 2010 and beyond.” Read the report here.
Those “multi-channel integration” trends are expected to include a heavy increase in mobile advertising. Given Google’s more-than-significant investments in mobile ad platforms over the past year, online marketers are going to start seeing more and more traffic that’s exclusively mobile.
What’s all this mean to the online gambling industry? Affiliate marketers with diverse websites and SEO techniques should be able to utilize these trends for greater profits. And for those affiliates who focus exclusively on online gambling — and that’s not a bad thing — should still be able to take advantage of this increased spending.
Although online casinos and Internet poker don’t strictly fall into these retails categories, some of this boom in online sales can be translated into online gaming affiliate success, and the trends for social media and mobile advertising will certainly apply to online gaming as well as traditional retail eCommerce — in fact, it already has.