7 August 2015
At SparkOptimus, we try to highlight the most important news and background stories in digital, e-commerce and retail. Here is our selection of last week’s news:
The first week of August saw the launch of Window’s new, not uncontroversial, operating system Windows 10. Demand has been overwhelming, with 14 million downloads in the first 24 hours, and according to Window’s head of Marketing Yusuf Mehdi the system has garnered overall positive feedback from users. It’s not all blue skies, however, as critics have pointed to the somewhat exorbitant, at times hidden, requirements in the new system. Want to watch a movie or play Solitaire? You will quickly find you need to pay up to enjoy the fringe benefits of the new OS. A more pressing concern for users, though, will likely be the privacy issues flagged by Hacker News and Reddit.
The L’Oreal Group might have bigger news to boast about. The cosmetics brand appears to be on track to book $1 billion in e-commerce sales this year putting the retailer amongst just 89 retailers to breach this mark; with the first six months of 2015 gone, L’Oreal already passed the halfway mark toward achieving that goal. Though beauty products are doing well online, it turns out that fashion has a less sexy rival. Sales of electrical goods are set to surpass apparel and accessories in 2015 with a predicted 29% of online sales, outstripping online fashion sales for the first time. E-commerce might also have gotten a boost from an unlikely source in July, as figures show the London Tube Strike kept consumers from going out to shop. At the height of the strike, an 8.9% drop in footfall was recorded, compared to the same day last year. That said, Selfridges might have struck on an ingenious way to lure customers to its store: Christmas in August.