In the Loupe
In the Loupe
Analyzing 10 Jewelry E-Commerce Stats from H2 2025
Michael dives into data pulled directly from the Punchmark E-Commerce platform for Q1 & Q2 of 2025. Punchmark services only the Jewelry industry, which means their platform data offers a unique insight into the e-commerce fluctuations and jewelry trends of the industry as it stands today.
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Welcome to In every month and since Punchmark only does jewelry stores retail, jewelry stores websites we kind of have a very cultivated and specific set of data and I think it's really interesting. I would love to share 10 key little takeaways that I had from breaking down both June as well as the first half of 2025. So everybody enjoy.
Speaker 2:This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmarkcom. Slash go.
Speaker 1:And now back to the show Okay, everybody. So, like I was mentioning, I'm going to be breaking down the first half of 2025 and also June 2025. This episode is going to be coming out in August, but my reports lag a little bit and also I didn't want to do July, because July is just like a slightly weirder month. I feel like it's not as indicative of how things are going, you know, for the entire industry, and I think that looking at the first half sort of takes out some of those outliers and starts to let us focus on, you know, what's in the immediate future. So here is insight number one 2025 is holding steady, so we are slightly ahead of 2024 when it comes to e-commerce numbers. What that means is that we are better than a stinky 2024.
Speaker 1:E-commerce in 2024 actually had a real cool off, at least in jewelry. There's a lot of reasons that could be. Traditionally luxury, I think, does more poorly during election years, at least in the US, and I think that 2024 had like a little bit of a slower year and 2025 is tracking ahead of that at a pretty considerable amount. It seems like it's tracking with 2023. But it's a little bit too early to say and I'll get into that more later. There's been no crash months and there's also been no incredible months. It's been pretty solid, whereas 2024 had a couple of months where it was a little bit stinky and then a couple of months that were really impressive. So this year a little bit more smooth. Again, we talk about smooth March slump. Each year. March is definitely the worst month and I'm looking at the chart right now and I saw every year I don't know if it's related to post-Valentine's Day kind of slump or you know cool offs, but it's also before Mother's Day. I think that if I could tell people to when to put their next promotion, I'd target March because just looking at it it definitely stands out. My data that I've sort of been collecting goes back to January 2021. That's like when I started normalizing some of this data and I can say that every single month, without fail, march is the worst month.
Speaker 1:Here's the next one. Q4 is going to be make or break and it's almost a little bit generous to say Q4. It's really November and December. November has the biggest, I guess, striation, the biggest change as far as what some years do, but December is just consistently very, very, very good. So it kind of depends on. I expect November to continue to be really good and I expect December to also be really really good. We'll see about October. There've been it's typically pretty consistently middle, and I think that Black Friday is starting sooner and sooner, which makes no sense when you think about the words, but whatever it's very much like Black Friday season starts around Halloween, so it might even be even earlier.
Speaker 1:All right, here's another one. In 2021 through 2023, this is a crazy stat. The first seven months accounted for about 45% of annual sales. That means that the second what is that? Six months, five months account for 55% of sales 55% of sales. And what that's even crazier is that when you look at just November and December, it's accounting for like I wish I had this stat already pulled, but 39% or something like that. So a lot is going to be riding on this November and December.
Speaker 1:I'm predicting that 2025 is going to outstrip 2024 last year by considerable margin. I don't think it's going to catch up to 23. 23 was still pretty strong and it had a higher order value by considerable margin. I just don't think that we're going to see those heights at the end of the year, especially with the way that diamonds and gold are trending. All right, now let's get that's four.
Speaker 1:Let's get into June 2025. So this is talking about this past kind of most recent month or so, and I'm sure this will be true for July, but I don't have the July report sent to me yet. So I wanna talk about average orders for clients and I pulled this number and you're saying it's like some of our clients are getting, you know, 10 to 12 orders a week and then some of our clients are getting one order a month. Some of them are trying harder. But Ross brings up a really good point and when I was breaking average orders per client down, it's such a hard number to convey without making someone feel like they're way overdoing it or they're way underperforming, because we also have some clients that are doing like 50 to 60 orders in a month and they're doing really well. So Ross makes a great point. He talks about kinks in the hose and have you ever been like watering your plants, like I've been doing a lot of gardening and you're watering and suddenly, like your hose is just like you know, you think it's doing all right, but it's like, wow, it's not reaching as far as I thought it was, and then you look back and you have like a hidden kink and then you unkink it and then suddenly it operates as it's supposed to. That's kind of how I think of your e-commerce flow, as it's going to be doing as well as it can until you go back and just inspect it and I recommend you inspect this thing every quarter, at least every half, but every quarter, maybe even every month Just go through, add a product to your checkout, get all the way to the last step. You don't have to buy it, but just go through and step it. So we're saying that for qualified jewelers, average orders are going to be 10-ish for a month. All right, everybody, we're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor.
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Speaker 1:And now back to the show. And we're back. All right, sales by day of the week. So I took all of our sales reports and I ran it through GPT, because I'm not doing this by hand. And here's another one Mondays surprisingly led the week with 27% of sales, which is pretty crazy. And I asked, hey, why do you think this is? And it said this is pretty crazy. And I asked hey, why do you think this is? And it said this is possibly due to weekend browsing converting into purchases at work. The first one if we think about it, there's seven days of the week. That means it should be evenly split across. You know, seven days. Mondays take up a ton with 27 percent, and then Fridays actually do pretty well with 20%, and then Thursdays are the worst with eight and a half percent. Crazy, did not expect that, didn't expect Mondays to be as good, but there you go Mondays, the big earner. Here's another one Sales by hour of the day. So that's one of the little stats I've never kind of dove into, but here you go.
Speaker 1:If you had to guess, what do you think the most busiest day is? If you're guessing, 7 o'clock pm to 8 o'clock pm, you'd be right, so congratulations. However, we're seeing a lot of strong activity between 2 and 6 pm. That's when, like, a majority of sales are happening between 2 and 8, with 7 and 8 being the most popular. You start to see a taper, you know, after 9 o'clock, however, there's some actual, some really good late night traffic from like 10 pm to midnight, especially like 11 pm, of course, and then, you know, looked, but the quietest times, 3 to 5 am, and this is all Eastern times. That's how we normalize. Kind of interesting, I would have thought. I definitely, you know, guessed that 2 to 8 is going to be the most popular, but really interesting that 11 pm is so important.
Speaker 1:Here's another one what jewelry categories are doing the best on e-commerce? So I went through and we looked at all of the orders sold and we noticed that by far the number one was charms, and that makes sense Lower price point, and then earrings and then watches and then bracelets, but watches and bracelets very low. So this is the number of items sold. So this is purely about number of checkouts or number of products actually converted. However, when you start to compare it to dollars transacted dollars transacted the most dollars transacted categories it actually flips. And this one is watches and then earrings, then rings and then a big drop off and then charms. So charms, obviously. It's like if you're just trying to figure out how to convert an e-commerce with a jewelry website. I think that your testing ground should just be with charms. They're a low price point, easy to convert. People buy them. There's no sizing, so charms are going to be an easy to kind of entry point If you're trying to start making some dollars with your site and actually converting into real sales.
Speaker 1:It sounds like watches. I will add the caveat Watches definitely have the highest rate of attempted fraud. So if you're going to be selling watches, I just highly recommend that you either have ClearSale or Eye for Fraud. We've talked about them a lot. You can check out Punchmark's website for more information about integrating with them. Highly highly recommend it Just because people I don't know, I don't know why they try to defraud with watches. It would be an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 1:But here is the last little nugget and I love this one. This is going to sound like a made-up fact or a stat, and it's not. This is a to sound like a made-up fact or a stat, and it's not. This is a real one. But I asked this GPT after I fed it several, many CSVs of sales data, and I asked it to find interesting correlations. This Retailers who log in more often sell significantly more and tend to process higher value orders, which you're probably like Mike. That sounds like the most made up punchmark stat of all time. You just want us to log in more. Yes, I do want you to log in more. Why? Because I think it actually does make you do better and it's not even thinking at this point. This is data.
Speaker 1:We do track logins, so we see accounts, we see how much you sell. We also track logins by your account. And when you start to draw correlations, correlation is measured on a scale of negative one to one. So zero means there's no correlation. One 1.0, means that there is an exact correlation as something goes up, something else also goes up in lockstep. It is a direct correlation. And then if you have a value of negative one, that is an inverse correlation, which means that when something goes up, something else always goes down. So the closer to one or negative one, the more direct or indirect of a correlation, so you can kind of bank on it more.
Speaker 1:All right, you probably already knew about this. I didn't know about this. I went to school for design. So when we look at, for example, the correlation between site manager logins and total sales that means the number of sales the correlation is 0.79. That is very, very highly correlated. Again, we're trying to measure out of one, so it's 79% of the way there. That means for our clients that log in a lot, their total sales typically increased with the number of logins. And that is also similar to site manager logins and average order value.
Speaker 1:This one obviously doesn't have as much of a direct correlation because this has to do with business type. Some of our businesses they sell watches and some of our businesses they sell charms. So as a result, charms you're just. You might be making a lot of sales, you might just not be moving as much money. We have one client I won't name who they are. They're on track to have like a thousand sales this year, which is that's a lot of sales. Uh, they are not moving as much money as you'd expect. It's because I think that they are just doing charms and you know what they're doing really well, good for them.
Speaker 1:I think it's so cool that they are transacting that and they're doing well. Anyways, the correlation between site manager logins and average order value is 0.4. So about halfway between, you know, to direct correlation. So that's really interesting. I think that we always look at forward-looking indicators so you know what is going to predict store closures or clients leaving us, or you know clients being really happy with us or things like that, and it's not the ones that you think might be the case. You think that like, oh, if a client makes a lot of sales, they're going to be really happy with us. Sometimes it's other things it has to do with. You know their survey results and how like they're speaking with us. So there's other more complicated aspects to this. But one thing that we can say is user adoption. So how much they're using our tools does typically make them like us more. It also sounds like it also has a huge impact on their sales volume and I'm learning it's probably just because of this connection and sort of feeling like a tool. You're swimming through the tool as opposed to, you know, fighting against the current. So just one of those things I wanted to highlight and showcase.
Speaker 1:I think that you know these data and statistics are very fascinating and I'm kind of always like, like, like squinting at them. I'm like looking hey, what can I learn from this? The one thing I've been seeing a lot is with average transaction size, and this one for a long time, was so steadily at, you know, just short of you know, between 450 and 475. But these days it doesn't seem like it's consistent. It is going up and down, up and down, up and down. It's trending back towards 600 right now for an average order value, and that hasn't been seen since pretty much like 2022. And why are these trends happening? I'd be lying if I said I know, I don't know why some of these things are happening. I can guess you know I've always had this thesis that in 2022 and 2023, lab-grown diamonds were kind of hitting their peak. People were selling lots of lab-grown diamonds and also the market and price was at its best like I don't know if the word is conjunction point or its best convergence point where people were selling a lot of them and they were also still worth a lot. But now, as the price has dipped, gold has gotten higher. You're buying less gold. I guess you could say with your purchases that more people are just foregoing the lab grown diamonds, or the lab grown diamonds aren't pulling as much sale, so the average order value is down and people are still selling the same amount of orders. As a result, the dollars transacted across the industry has fallen off a little bit in the last year. As a result of those things. I do think that there's a world where this comes right back around and as people start buying you know, gold and fine gold, maybe they start buying alternative metals and then they start buying gemstones and diamonds in these alternative metals and what that could mean is that suddenly, you know the price kind of comes back up for average order value. But it's these things that I'm starting to kind of track.
Speaker 1:I don't have the answer to everything, but I can't watch. The one thing I also see and I didn't have a great way to clean this data so that I would be able to share it with you and clean it, meaning like control for people who do not qualify is the performance of our sites that have some type of financing option, so that is Sezzle or Affirm or you know things like that. Having those types of financing options really does make a difference and we're seeing that's how people are checking out for especially for watches, but also when they buy gold jewelry a lot of times that they're financing out their options using one of these services. I don't have the way currently at my fingertips with my admin controls, to disqualify anybody who does not have a financing option and then taking them, so I just have to look as like a whole. So it's not as good, but that is like a thesis that I'm working on is that people who do have a financing option are doing better. That's kind of where I might leave it A shorter episode.
Speaker 1:I kind of wanted just to explain that I think that e-commerce is changing. It used to be for me. I thought that we were going to just help jewelers get on the road to selling you know, a million or $2 million online every year. I thought that like a store was going to be that guy and I just think that now we are not more popular than the in-store option. We can't like. We, your website are not like. It's not about only selling online. It's about that omni-channel solution and I think I'm starting to see that these online events and promotions and having it as a sales opportunity benefits the in-store version if you're doing it right and doing it at the same time Very narcissistically, I think. Of myself. I used to think that, oh, they should be selling everything online, and I don't think that that's the case anymore. I think it's like a balancing act and it's about having the opportunities. If you're not offering one or the other, then you're leaving money on the table. All right, I think that's where I'm going to end it.
Speaker 1:Cheers Bye. Thanks everybody for listening. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burbo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cocker. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple podcasts and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash loop. That's L-O-U-P-E. Thanks, we got an exciting episode next week. Tune in. Cheers Bye.
