Articles of Interest

Pace of Holiday Sales Double Last Year
The San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, November 25, 2000
by Raymond Hennessey

Dawn Comiskey of Pleasant Hill lives just minutes from Sun Valley Mall, but she's not setting foot in a shopping center this year. Instead, she's doing all her holiday shopping online - for the third year in a row.

"I'm almost done," she said. "It's wonderful not to have to stand in line or wait in traffic."

Yesterday was not the busiest shopping day of the year for e-tailers; that won't come until mid-December. But early indications are that Comiskey and millions of other online shoppers will left e-tail sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas to $6.2 billion, almost double the $3.2 billion in sales posted last year, according to BizRate.com.

BizRate, which does exit surveys of online shoppers, measured a dramatic spurt on Monday, when 1 million shoppers spent $133.4 million, up from $59 million for the same day last year. Tuesday also showed a jump, with 1 million shippers spending $124.9 million, up from $70 million last year. (Statistics for later in the week aren't yet available.)

"It's clear there will be a dramatic increase this year from last year," said Seth Geiger, BizRate's vice president of professional services.

Yahoo! said the number of orders places yesterday will its partner e-commerce sites had doubled from the day after Thanksgiving last year, but declined to give exact volume. The giant portal has more than 10,000 partners in its shopping area, ranging from big names like the Gap, Dell and Eddie Bauer to mom-and-pop shops.

Nielsen/NetRating, which tracks online traffic, also had encouraging data yesterday for e-commerce sites. The ratings firm measures how many people visit Web sites, not how many actually buy. Sean Kaldor, vice president for e-commerce, said typically 5 percent of site visitors make a purchase, but that rises to 8 percent during the holidays.

Nielsen/NetRatings jangled some nerves earlier this month when it reported there was no week-to-week growth in visits to 40 top e-commerce Web sites for the week ended Nov. 5, even though visits had risen 12 percent for the same week last year.

But yesterday, the firm said the number of online visitors to its "e-tail index sites" for the week ended Nov. 19 was up 17 percent, after having grown 12 percent the previous week.

That adds up to more overall growth so far in November than last year. For the first three weeks of November, shopping visitors grew 29 percent, versus 21 percent during the same time frame last year.

"We had a slow start to the online shopping season, but are making up for that," said Kaldor.

The key winner is apparel sites, where traffic is up 90 percent for the month. Old Navy's site, for example, had 132 more visitors for the week ending Nov. 19 than for the previous week. Although buying clothing online has the obvious drawback of not being able to try on the merchandise, "you don't need to try on apparel you buy as gifts," Kaldor noted.

Even though Black Friday isn't the busiest day of the year in cyberspace, there were some glitches online yesterday. Amazon.com, the biggest e-tailing destination, had a site outage for about half an hour yesterday morning. A spokesman said it was caused by a problem with internal systems, not a surge in traffic.

Best Buy's Web site was overwhelmed by shoppers who heard a false rumor that it was selling this season's unattainable gift, Sony's PlayStation 2 console.

Online shoppers aren't conditioned to hit the mouse the way they hit the malls on the day after Thanksgiving.

Last year, online shopping first spurted on the Monday after Thanksgiving and then grew steadily, peaking on Dec. 14, according to BizRate. On that date, 2.6 million shoppers ordered $241.7 million worth of merchandise.

Although sales online are growing much faster than those in regular stores, e-tailing is still a small segment of overall holiday spending. According to the National Retail Federation, holiday sales will hit $197.2 billion, up 6 percent from last year. That would make e-tailing about 3 percent of the total.

Back to the Articles Index