Jewelry Online, Green From Red and White
According to eMarketer, jewelry sales online are now at the $2.1 billion mark, constituting 3.5% of the $59.4 billion total. With that figure projected to rise to 7% by 2010, there couldn’t be a better time to start an affiliate business to cash in on this trend.
Luxury items have topped Internet ROI lists for quite a while now. Despite security concerns and the need to see and touch the items, consumers are turning in ever greater numbers to purchases online.
There may be several reasons for this; we can only speculate. Security has either improved or the perception has changed. Better information about the product may be available now, or it may simply be that the considerably better prices to be found online may finally have proved irresistible.
One recent study suggests that the overall increase in shopping online is in large part the result of the greatly enhanced ability to do comparison shopping among a wide variety of vendors.
Price comparison sites can take a large share of the credit for this. Not only do they allow shoppers to find the cheapest price, but they provide reviews from a wide array of shoppers. Since those reviews cover both the item itself and the vendors, those sites in essence constitute a kind of social network. In this case, they didn’t wait for the arrival of Web 2.0, obviously since they’ve been around for 10 years.
Amazon and Bizrate are only two of the most obvious examples, but with new relatively easy datafeeds capability, it’s not too much work to make a simplified version yourself.
If you’re going to go to the effort, targeting Canadian consumers might be a good place to start. With higher broadband penetration and a shopping research-prone Internet population, Canada is primed for contributing increased sales to affiliates.
The difficulty has traditionally lain in Canadians’ security and privacy concerns about shopping online. The marketer who develops a way to reassure them about the safety of online shopping will be near the head of the line for raking in those Canadian dollars.