January is a critical period, in which retailers strive to clear dead stock and to patch up in the case of disappointing Christmas sales.
Our Market Analytics software, which tracks global online retail activity, shows 48% of the apparel market to currently be on sale. Menswear sees a higher level of discounting than womenswear and childrenswear, with 52% of products on sale currently on discount, compared to 48% and 49% respectively.
The premium market sees the highest level of discounting, with 63.3% of current product on sale. The market tends to have product ranges which are as seasonally bound as designer collections, but without the level of consumer demand, hence high discounting late in a season. The luxury market has the lowest level of discounting, with only 27.7% of current stock reduced. Meanwhile, 39% of the value market and 48% of the mass market is currently reduced.
Outerwear ranks #1 discounted category
We analysed each apparel retail category to rank the level of discounting across the market, finding outerwear to have the highest proportion of product discounted (61% of the total number of products retailing are reduced). However, only 9.9% of those were discounted by more than 50% – fairly superficial discounting for this seasonal category. The pie chart to the right ranks the level of discounting across each category, with tops and dresses in second and third places. Once we look further into levels of discounting over 50% however, we can see that the dress category has one of the highest rates of significant discounts – 57% of products are reduced, and 15% of those by more than 50%.
All in ones have significant discounting too – with 19.9% of products reduced more than 50%, however, there are 26,000 more discounted dresses online than all in ones!
5 retailers with the largest sale offering
The five online retailers with the largest selection of discounted stock are Zalandos, Farfetch, Zappos, ASOS, Kohls – an interesting blend of pure play, boutique and department retailers. Zalando have over 101,000 discounted products, with 10.5% of those reductions being greater than 50%.
Bargain lace dresses
Seeing heavy discounting in the dress category, our data reveals ASOS, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdales and House of Fraser to be the retailers with the largest offering of reduced dresses. The most common price bracket for reduced dresses is £15-20. This season’s most reduced dress style is the lace dress, with 10% of reductions over the 50% threshold being lace dress products. This was followed by maxi dresses and jersey dresses.
Despite the high competition around lace dress reductions, few retailers are pushing their promotions on this product currently – though many pushed the product full-price in the build up to Christmas. If you’ve got lace dresses to shift, we suggest you get in quick!
Retailers use this sort of data to power their pricing strategies and rely particularly heavily upon real-time updates during periods of competitive discounting. Talk to us today if you’d like to find out more.
Katie Smith
