| Holiday sales soar on Internet Share now 5% of total |
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| Holiday sales may have been ho-hum at shopping malls this year, but on the Internet they boomed.
Online holiday sales grew by about 29 percent from a year ago, according to some estimates -- much better than the 2 percent to 5 percent gains expected at traditional stores. Shoppers spent about $15.8 billion on the Internet during November and December, according to the latest projections from Web tracking company comScore Networks. This year's increase in online sales was better than many analysts had expected, almost matching last year's 30 percent rise. E-commerce is enjoying large gains in part because the industry, almost nonexistent a decade ago, is still young. Online commerce accounts for only about 5 percent of retail sales. And even with this shopping season's strong showing, Internet "e-tailers" are not coming close to replacing traditional stores, as some suggested during the height of dot-com hype. "If there were people predicting that online retail would overtake [traditional retail stores], I think they were definitely overestimating its effect," said Graham Mudd of comScore. Still, this shopping season's online numbers are impressive. Amazon.com, the undisputed leader and bellwether indicator for e-commerce, said this year was the best in its 10-year history, At its peak, Amazon sold 32 items every second. It shipped purchases to 217 countries around the globe. During the week leading up to Christmas, nearly one in 10 Web visits in the United States were to a shopping or classified advertising Web site, according to Web tracking service Hitwise. Thanksgiving Day was the biggest day in history for visitors to Internet shopping sites, according to the firm. Dell Inc.'s Dell.com was the third-most-visited shopping site on the Internet during the week leading up to Christmas, according to Hitwise. Only eBay and Amazon had more visitors, and the Austin, Texas-based computer maker's site attracted more traffic than the sites of some major holiday retails, including Walmart.com, Bestbuy.com and Target.com. Benacio Figueroa, a Dell spokesman, said the company made a particularly strong holiday sales push to consumers this year with portable music players and flat-screen monitors. Figueroa declined to give specifics on Dell's overall holiday sales. But in the four days after Thanksgiving -- typically considered the peak of the holiday shopping season -- visits to the consumer portion of Dell's Web site were up 60 percent from a year ago, according to the company. |
What may ultimately be the biggest news from this season's online shopping results, though, is how traditional retailers are finally starting to make some headway in cyberspace.
Despite its overall sales gains, visits to Amazon.com fell 7 percent from a year ago in the week leading up to Christmas, according to Hitwise. Walmart.com and Target.com saw 18 percent increases in visits that same week. "That traditional retailers are starting to give the online retailers a run for their money," said Bill Tancer, vice president for research at Hitwise. Most big retailers don't provide specifics on their Internet sales, and even those that do won't release final holiday figures until early January. But at a time when traditional store sales were mediocre for many retailers, online sales helped make the crucial selling season much more merry and bright. At J.C. Penny Co., same store sales increased 12 percent during November. But Internet sales were up 20 percent, the department store said. J.C. Penney officials in early November predicted same-store sales would be down in December and January, while Internet and catalog sales would go up. Wal-Mart, the nations' biggest retailer, doesn't break out Internet sales but estimated an 18 percent increase in visits to its Web site during the week of Christmas. Overall, Wal-Mart estimated its December sales were up between 1 percent and 3 percent compared with last year. "It was a nice complement to our brick-and-mortar operation," said Wal-Mart spokesman Gus Whitcomb. By Bob Keefe |
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