Online shopping saw a massive spike in online sales last month, up 80% compared to July 2006.
Online sales were actually a huge £1.86 billion higher than they were in July 2006.

Other facts that may be of interest to all you shopping cart owners:

• The IMRG Index exceeded 4000 for the first time, suggesting that UK e-retail sales had exceeded £4 billion in a month for the first time (£4.2bn).
• In the high street, the average value of weekly sales in July was £5 billion, 3.3% higher than July 2006.
• The highest sales growth was in electrical goods, according to National Statistics Online
• Clothing sales were also strong online: the IMRG Clothing / Footwear / Accessories Index was 56% higher than a year earlier
• Annual growth for: Jan = 16.5%; Feb = 34.7%, Mar = 40.9%, Apr = 54.4%; May = 48.0%; Jun = 55.1%.

Why such a huge annual growth?

• Very wet weather - The rubbish UK summer has encouraged people to travel abroad - encouraging many people to shop last minute online.  It’s also forced many people into replacing water-damaged goods.
• More competitive online prices
• Detailed product information available
• Ease of the buying process
• New customers as a result of strong uptake on domestic broadband
• Increased confidence encouraging repeat online buying.

Here’s a new tutorial for all you PHP gurus.  Create an unobtrusive Ad for your shopping cart using PHP and iQuery.

The PHP tutorial comes from the SEO Expert Blog.  In the tutorial he shows you how to create an ad with the advertising content that Amazon has to offer, enabling you to create an unobtrusive ad that doesn’t flash, sing at you, blink or move around.

The process is broken up into four steps:

• The Data Structure
• Converting the PHP Array to JavaScript
• The HTML Output
• The JavaScript

In-depth PHP shopping cart tutorials, expert case studies, business and technical lectures, and networking events will make up the third anniversary of the PHP conference.  The latest news… Joel Spolsky is to Keynote.

DevZone announced the news earlier this week.  Although Joel Spolsky isn’t a PHP developer, he knows a lot about building good PHP shopping carts and software.

The description of his talk at the PHP conference is as follows:

“In many product categories, from software to consumer electronics, the product with the most market share is often more expensive and less functional than the number two product. I will explore why this happens and suggest some ways to design a blue chip product that people will love. After you get great software and products using the usual repertoire of debugging, usability testing, etc., you have to go still further and think about beauty, user happiness, and emotional impact.”