I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. The Holiday (shopping) Season is indeed fast upon us and early indications point to a slight gain in overall sales. According to comScore, online consumer spending was up 17% for the first 26 days of the holiday shopping season (November 1- 26) including Cyber Monday.

In all, they report that e-commerce spending for that period was $10.7 billion, up 17% versus the corresponding days last year, indicating that more people are shopping online for bargains and forgoing trips to the mall. The good news is that they’re still buying.

ONFORCE QUARTERLY INSIGHTS

Data from the OnForce Marketplace seems to reflect this trend. We recently released our third quarter OnForce Services Marketplace Index (OSMI) report which compiles data from over 100,000 on-site service events from the last quarter. As with previous reports (here and here) we continue to see fascinating trends that reinforce an increasing demand for on-site services.

Among the more interesting findings was that Desktop Computer, Point-of-Sale (POS) and Consumer Electronics were the three highest categories in terms of volume, while Security, Peripherals and Consumer Electronics were the three most expensive service categories. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which had been the most expensive category in Q1 and Q2, fell three spots from its top ranking, despite no real change in demand for the service.

Additional points of interest from Q3 include:

• Margins on POS service work rose for the third consecutive quarter
• PC Laptop and Network services were the least expensive categories
• Hourly rates for Consumer Electronics were unchanged, despite forecasts of a decline in consumer spending
• Houston, New York and San Antonio had the three largest on-site service economies in Q3

So what conclusions can we draw from this data? Well for one, we can see an opportunity for manufacturers, resellers and retailers to capitalize on the last mile of the consumer electronics sale: expert installation and support. As technology becomes increasingly specialized, consumers are less the do-it-yourself types and are instead seeking installations and maintenance services for higher-end electronics such as home networking, media servers and HDTVs. In fact, a study from Pew last week revealed that 15 percent of Americans who had a piece of technology break down in the past year were never able to get it repaired.

End-to-end customer service is a hurdle that retailers and manufacturers will need to overcome and one where VARs can play a leading role. CRN highlights the opportunity, as does CE Pro.

We’ll continue to post additional thoughts and trends from our Q3 report. In the mean time, we like to know what trends you are observing. Let us know by adding a comment or sending us an email.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 5:46 pm and is filed under Consumer Electronics, Marketplace Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.