Report: Easter traffic, sales down in 2014

New York - The eight-day run up to Easter 2014 fell shy of the previous year’s comparable period by 9.3% in traffic and 8.9% in sales. According to data from retail analytics provider RetailNext, there was a 1.2- percentage-point improvement in conversion, which helped generate a sales decline that was less than the traffic decline.



Average transaction value (ATV) was down by 1.9% leading up to Easter Sunday, with sales per shopper up by 0.4 percentage points. Friday, April 18, 2014 (Good Friday) saw higher conversion than Good Friday in 2013, along with smaller traffic and sales declines seen for the eight-day period leading up to Easter and even before Easter.



According to RetailNext, possible reasons for the decline in 2014 include Easter coming a couple of weeks after the Daylight Savings adjustment (as compared to 2013 when Easter was more than a month after the adjustment), a period that typically sees positive sales trends. Along those lines, Easter in 2013 coincided with the start of Spring, a time when there is clear weather changes and as such a surge in people going out.