Following the holiday bonanza, January can be a dead month for many retailers. Recent numbers from Nielsen revealed the ten companies that best survived (in terms of online conversion rates) the quiet time.

Other businesses should be able to learn something from the retailers’ success, although, to be fair, there are definitely some seasonal patterns at work. L.L. Bean.com placed first, for example (with a conversion rate of 23.6 percent), and its cold-weather clothing surely drove a large part of its success.

Another clothing provider, J. Jill, nabbed the second spot, and then Proflowers came in third. People preparing for the spring planting season no doubt contributed to its 17.8 percent conversion rate. And let’s not forget the flowers-and-jewelry-and-cards holiday that occurs in February.

In a possible move away from seasonal trends, Drugstore.com somehow wound up in fifth place. Our best guess here is that a lot of people got both the winter sniffles and the desire to medicate them; this may be unavoidable. But Drugstore.com also ran some promotions and highlighted some partnerships that might have helped.

Finally – we’ll skip a few spots – in seventh, ninth, and tenth places, CDW, Bose, and eBay showed up as people put their Christmas money to use. Bose, especially, has built up a great reputation through advertising.

We’ll now direct a hat tip to MarketingCharts for providing the Nielsen data. Businesses might want to take a close look at it and judge what they can do in response.

Comments

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.