August 4th, 2011 is a day many won’t forget–the NYTimes made sure of it with this headline: Stocks Plunge on Fears of Global Turmoil. The DOW dove over 500 points, and “with a steep decline of around 5 percent in the United States on Thursday, stocks have now fallen nearly 11 percent in two weeks.”
For many readers a wrecking ball had just crashed through the thin shell of confidence they had left over the American economy. With financial Armageddon breathing fire through the NYSE, the folks over at Internet Retailer played the fiddle to an unexpected tune titled “Another Hot Month for E-Retail.” The first stanza went something like this: “E-retail sales in July increased 14% from the same month a year ago, according to the latest SpendingPulse report from MasterCard Advisors.”
The article also went on to speculate that sales could have increased because of rising gas prices and summer heat. That’s right, make it cost prohibitive for people to travel and turn up the outdoor thermostat and presto–ecommerce sales spring from the top hat. It’s not that easy though, as the rest of the article suggests. Apparel and luxury sales were up, while electronics sales were down. Obviously gamers are sloughing their Call of Duty accessory upgrades to pace the house in a pair of Louis Vuitton loafers.
Another wrench to toss into this odd math is today’s NYTimes article titled U.S. Posts Stronger Job Gains Amid Fear, posted only one day after the August 4th stock market crash scare news.
What’s a rational ecommerce store merchant to do? Our advice is to visit roller coaster theme parks ONLY on vacation. Instead of bouncing up and down over heavily biased and deformed tracks of uncertainly, put the time into conducting an SEO analysis of your own Google or Yahoo! analytics, and respond accordingly. It’s not as breathtaking as dancing with the media devils, but it will prevent you from making rash, impulsive moves against some invisible economic gremlins fanned by the imagination.
