Hitwise has just released a brief report examining the spending habits for web users over the holiday season. Using traffic data from its Retail 500 index, the site found that traffic in 2008 was lower than it was last year, but was (perhaps surprisingly) higher than it was back in 2006.
The study also found that the biggest drop off in traffic was among shoppers that fell under the ‘high-income’ demographic, which is classified as households earning more than $150,000 per year. Traffic from these upper-class buyers dropped 12.33% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, versus a drop of around 1% for those making less than $30,000 a year and an increase in traffic from everyone else. The report doesn’t make any guesses as to why this happened (perhaps the more wealthy users were losing more money in the stock market?), but it’s an interesting trend nonetheless.
Finally, the report says that the trends toward lowered traffic reversed in the days immediately following Christmas as shoppers looked for deals. This was especially pronounced at “luxury retailers”, who may have been forced to slash prices more viciously in light of the economic climate.
There’s a ton of inventory at the high end retailers right now, and thus lots of amazing deals too. Barney’s, Bloomingdales, Saks, Neiman Marcus all had or are having designer sales where prices are 70%+ off original price.
Pretty nuts, but great for shoppers and bargain hunters like myself
Worried about the new taxes coming?
The deals really were tremendous this Holiday Season. I suspect the relative strength in online shopping in the lower income brackets is due to the fact that in 2007, they tended to shop more offline. The apparent “strength” in this segment is more due to share migration.
Personally, I got some great deals. I picked up an Xbox 360 for 20% off and a Panasonic Viera TH-42PZ85U 42 Inch 1080p Plasma for just $865 thanks to discounts I found on TechDealDigger.com.
ah, for an explanation take a look at the WSJ story on the use of pawn shops by the affluent…
it’s not just that paris hilton is shopping less, which is the general thinking, it’s that her white collar handlers and staff are selling their wares to pawnshops to meet their mortgages…
perhaps 2009 is the year in which we see a change from a culture of want to a culture of need? or is that too dreamy?
Are these the same people that were layoff from Wall St.
Anyone else wondering how Hitwise knows the income of surfers?
Maybe high income shoppers knew to hold out for deals? This idea is gleened from the summary: high-income shoppers hit hard AFTER Christmas.
Are these the same people that were layoff from Wall St