After a tepid start, online holiday sales seem to be picking up a bit. Online sales on Cyber Monday as measured by comScore were a healthy $846 million, up 15 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. Online sales since Thanksgiving are up 12 percent to $2.4 billion. But overall online sales in November of $12 billion are still down 2 percent.
Can sales make up the difference over the next five weeks? As the chart above shows, holiday sales so far in 2008 (the red bars) are struggling to keep up with the levels we saw in 2007 (the dark blue bars). Maybe consumers have just been postponing purchases longer than usual, but now that the U.S. is officially in a recession that knowledge will likely have a psychological impact on people’s willingness to splurge. (I love how the recession news didn’t come out until after the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend).
Hitwise also offers some insight into what happened on Cyber Monday in terms of Website traffic to retail sites. Overall, among the top 500 retail sites, traffic was down one percent on Cyber Monday. But online-only sites saw a traffic increase of 5 percent (versus a 4 percent decline for the sites of brick-and-mortar stores).
In the fight between Amazon and Walmart.com for online holiday dominance, Amazon came out on top with traffic increasing 21 percent on Cyber Monday. Walmart.com was the second most visited retail site.
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barely hoding
+1
I’d say barely holding, but even that is a victory really, considering many thought sales would be awful this season.
Overall spending will be down but I think that online shopping will not drop as sharp as other methods of shopping. Why go out and waste gas money on products that you can use toward purchases for loved ones this season? Granted gas prices have dipped, but if your budgeting for Christmas, the free shipping deals online seem much more cost effective than loading up the wagon to hit up the brick and mortars.
Also, maybe the recession will help shift the paradigm of shopping into more of an online dominated role.
Recession hasn’t stopped me. I’m spending like a mo-fo.
Interesting…wish I had money to spend this past Monday. But I’m saving up essentially until I can put my (hopeful) bonus to work.
Online sales have definitely increased by measure of people who I know that are running online retail outlets… the guys from http://Shopify.com also wrote a blog post recently confirming the same thing…
Never doubt the American consumers ability to spend.
I don’t think online sales are going to do too hot this season, because of the economy. Then again, with Barack Obama getting ready to be sworn into office and possibly handing out stimulus checks, it might.
We hope mobile commerce trends increase as well.
We just launched our first iPhone app called GiftCards powered by GiftCertificates.com that makes it easy for users to order gift cards from top brands (Macy’s, REI, Gap, etc.) natively from the app. We’re hoping this kind if innovation will help make it easier for customers to buy this holiday season - even if that means shopping while on-the-go.
So far our sales have been somewhat tepid (we just launched), but we’re hoping they will pick up soon.
http://www.GiftCardsApp.com
haha that’s rich. erick “inflate our own posted layoff numbers” schonfeld thinks that the word ‘recession’ might scare people into spending less.
pot, meet kettle.