What does the weather do to ecommerce?
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Britain has a reputation amongst tourists for being a land of perpetual rain, grey skies and warm beer. In reality of course, only one of those points is true; as with any country the climate in the south of the country varies from that in the north, with the added geographical fact of being right next to the Atlantic Ocean. This means all manner of weather can blow in and a more accurate characterisation of Britain is that it can experience multiple seasons in a single day.
It is not the warmest place on Earth, but we experience heatwaves and droughts. It is not the coldest place on Earth, but temperatures can drop well below freezing at times (Britain is actually on a similar longitude line to Moscow, but the wind off the Atlantic mostly keeps the coldest air in check so the average temperatures can be quite different). Frankly, we get a bit of everything in this country from a weather perspective, hence it comes up in conversation so frequently.
From Showers to Sunshine: How Weather Shapes Consumer Behaviour
We can also be guilty of blaming the weather for all our woes; it’s always too sunny or too cold or too wet or too dry. And, when it comes to retail, this is most certainly the case. But how fair is that? Was it really the weather what won it?
Retail is a sector that clearly revolves around seasonality. The sort of stock that a clothing retailer might be promoting in Summer is going to be very different from what it thinks it can shift in Winter, for the very obvious reason that demand is low for shorts and vests when it’s cold, but high for jackets and jumpers. There’s little point in merchandising umbrellas at the front of the store if there isn’t a cloud in the sky.
Many retailers report that changes in the seasons, when people actually feel things have shifted, can influence demand quite notably. So if we experience a cold winter, people don’t switch their attention onto spring ranges in large numbers until there is a change in the temperature that people really pick up on. One warm morning, when people leave the house at 7am in a heavy jacket then realise it’s too warm for that garment now, can make all the difference to the product ranges they browse. One swallow may not a summer make, but it sort of does in retail.
This topic is pertinent now because of the kind of weather we have experienced this year. It has been very sunny with the lowest Spring rainfall in 50 years. We then had three heatwaves in four weeks across June and July. At the halfway point of the year, the below graph shows how some of the categories IMRG tracks were performing against their 2025 forecast.
Many of them are ahead of forecast, so is it just the weather? Some are easier to assess on that basis than others.
Forecasting Sales: When Weather Isn’t the Whole Story
Sports & outdoors, for example, would clearly see a demand benefit to the weather being dry and sunny; it is outstripping the forecast by a factor of two. If we extract garden in isolation from home & garden, it is actually up +6.4%. Electrical might seem a bit of a stretch, but look at this graph of small appliances; it’s not hard to spot where the heatwaves occurred.
As a category it was not actually having a very good year in terms of revenue growth. Once the heatwave period kicked in, growth ballooned to over +100% at one point, and over +70% a few times too. The reason? Small appliances includes fans, air con units and ice-cream makers. As soon as the weather forecast says a heatwave is coming, they fly off the shelf.
The anomaly in the category growth chart is clothing. An extended dry, sunny period should have been music to the ears of a category where seasonally they are stocking shorts, t-shirts and swimming trunks. Yet it is currently well off forecast. Clothing is one of the categories where the impact of rain or heat is most profoundly felt and yet, it has not influenced a favourable demand spike.
So why is the weather not ‘working’ there? The fact is clothing is in a sustained period of tough trading conditions at the moment, experiencing a unique set of factors not least of which is the success of Vinted and people buying second-hand.
It seems like it will require some degree of sun indeed for its fortunes to be turned by the weather.
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