uxury watch brands continue to sell their products online and at increasingly higher prices. Within the past month three more luxury brands have partnered with third party eCommerce sites Mr Porter and Net-A-Porter, a business that luxury conglomerate Richemont has a 49% stake.
The latest to join Mr Porter are Officine Panerai fake watches and it is doing it in a big way. The Italian nautical watch brand is making available 25 timepieces from its Luminor and Radiomir collections, along with a Panerai table clock, on the website. The price range for timepieces is $5,000 to $28,600.
Using eCommerce to sell high-end watches has moved beyond a trend and is now mainstream and inevitable among the few holdouts. Online sales of luxury goods, overall, could triple to $82.8 billion by 2025, according to the 2015 Altagamma-McKinsey Digital Luxury Experience Observatory.
Watch brands have been deliberate in moving online and even more so when partnering with third-party sites. However, this is obviously changing as well. For example, Panerai has become the 20th luxury watch brand to sell through Mr Porter. Four of the brands on Mr Porter are Richemont-owned. The rest are independent brands with the exception of LVMH-owned Zenith.
It’s probably a good practice to have an online partner. According to PMX Agency’s Trend Report of luxury brands online, two out of five online shoppers continue to shop after leaving a luxury brand’s website. Their first choice is department stores followed by pure eCommerce sites such as the Porter websites.