Euclid Spending Report For October Released

By Cheryl Knight, contributing writer

Retail analytics company Euclid has released its latest U.S. Retail Benchmarks for the month of October. For the most part, October showed a slight increase in shopping activity over September.

This increase was not enough to drive positive growth over the same time last year, as many shoppers lacked intent, also shown in the increase in bounce rates, which were at levels not seen since last year. Overall, the numbers reveal that shoppers were cautionary in their spending during October.

Summary Of New Report

In summary, general merchandise, apparel, furniture, and other (GAFO) fell 5.7 percent over the previous month. On the other hand, clothing and accessories sales rose a little less than a point, at 0.9 percent. General merchandise finished out the sales estimates for the covered verticals at minus 2.7 percent.

Year-over-year in-store traffic increased by 2.9 percent over the previous month, though the bounce rate, or the percentage of shoppers who leave a store within five minutes of entering, grew by 1.1 to 11.6 percent in October.

A Look Back

Fueling September’s growth was sales in back-to school shopping, according to last month’s study. September saw an increase in the GAFO category, while clothing and accessories saw a loss in sales of 1 percent. General merchandise saw a marginal increase of 0.4 percent.

Traffic in-store was also down year-over-year compared to the same month in 2013 at minus 16.8 percent, and the bounce rate actually saw a decrease of minus 2.2 percent. So, while fewer people visited retail locations in September, the U.S. Retail Benchmarks for that month showed that shoppers actually stayed in stores longer while shopping.

This is in contrast to October, which saw an increase in the number of shoppers in the store, but the amount of time they stayed in store decreased.