Online holiday sales deflated 3 percent this year. ComScore estimates that holiday sales in the U.S. totaled $25.5 billion between November 1 and December 23, the last day orders could be delivered in time for Christmas. The comparable total in 2007 was $26.3 billion.
Sales were struggling to keep up with last year’s totals all holiday season. In the end, they fell short. (Hitwise comes to the same conclusion).
A simple look at U.S. traffic to retail sites in December through Christmas Eve (see table below) shows that eBay had the most unique visitors (85.4 million), followed by Amazon (76.2 million), and Wal-Mart (51.5 million). Even though eBay attracted the most people, its traffic was down 4 percent from last year. Amazon saw 7 percent more visitors, which might have contributed to its claiming to have a great Christmas.
But the retail sites that saw the biggest increases in visitors was Apple (up 19 percent) and Hewlett-Packard (up 28 percent). Dell, in contrast, saw a 17 percent decline in visitors.
(Photo by Randy Son of Robert)
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The crisis reminds us of something very important - the world´s economy is amazingly vulnerable, something which I tend to forget.
The world? these stats are US based…cause amazon.com does ship half its stuff to Canada. So annoying…if things are bad locally just expand where you send shit.
doesn’t oops
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And soon something will remind us how resilient it is. Not to despair!
Agreed Assaf… now is the time to BUILT so once everybody has means again, they buy and you can get your return in investments
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
Keep in mind that traffic is only a part of the equation, you still have to:
a- Convince the visitor to buy
b- Have an effective strategy so they buy a lot.
IMO there just wasn’t as much cool stuff to buy this year, no new gadgetry or game console, etc. that was a must have; I think that should be taken into account as well.
a few highlights as well, AMZN reported a staggering 6.3 million items purchased on Dec 15th alone.
we hooked into amazon preholiday and saw strong results all season. we also saw solid traffic but lower conversions. it was a survive season for all retailers, but 2009 will get back to growth.
I just watched the documentary “Maxed out” on watch instantly through my Xbox 360 on my HDTV.
I got to thinking?
Why *should* Americans spend?
Let’s further punish the credit industry. Let’s really beat them up. So that the only thing they have left are bankrupcies and bad debt.
Chris, I agree we shouldn’t spend on credit but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend. If you have the money and want something, by all means buy it. Just pay cash. That’s the way to hurt the credit industry.
We need to reduce our dependence on debt, and that goes for individuals as well as companies (tech and e-commerce companies are some of the worst). According to Retailer Daily Sears is operating with over $2 Billion in debt. Radio Shack had over $700 million in debt. What’s worse, these companies cannot operate without debt… if their credit is frozen they will be forced into bankruptcy because their revenue to debt ratios are ridiculous.
People seem to have forgotten the point is to make and save money. I guess when you live in a country with the largest debt imaginable, it just seems natural to borrow, borrow, borrow. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.
I just watched the documentary “Maxed out” on watch instantly through my Xbox 360 on my HDTV.
I got to thinking?
Why *should* Americans spend?
Let’s further punish the credit industry. Let’s really beat them up. So that the only thing they have left are bankruptcies and bad debt.
If somebody could put that idea into a website, they wouldn’t only be rich, they would be god.
biggest surprise is Sears.
I don’t think all of the smaller ecommerce experienced a decline. I expect a strong 2009 4th quarter especially when compared to this year.
Kevin
http://www.kidsdesk.net
I think we should also look at smaller/vertical ecommerce site to see the full picture: after all, backbone of the business in US is small business, and they do a lot of business through their webstore. This is especially true for boutique brand in various vertical market.
I wrote about a contradictory article I read.
ReadWriteWeb reports that Compete’s data is based on the top ten etailers…
we cant predict anything at this particular point of time and everyone cares about their assests now rather than spending them on something,As global economy has slowed down,each and every company is under recession and so as the ecommerce due to lack of purchases,there should be some flow of money to circulate else everything would be standby
regards
aartha
Online continues to outperform their bricks & mortar counterparts. Great news. Will be a theme that continues for years and years to come.
The numbers make sense since we are in a recession and the economy is low.
Hey Erick,
You seemed to leave out the fact that there were 5 less shopping days in 2008 v 2007, which is, to quote Burgundy, “kind of a big deal”. I’m quite sure if you take that into account, in this economic climate, it doesn’t look as bad as you portray it.
Also, the sky is not falling for Sports/Fitness (up 31%), Books/Mags/Video Games (up 17-18%). The big losers are office supplies and music/movies.
I don’t get why TC focuses on the companies, and not the verticals to tell the whole story.
Thank you for sharing this.
Apple’s sales are more likely because of iphone. It’s a revolution like thing in mobile phone industry.
I think we should also look at smaller/vertical ecommerce site to see the full picture: after all, backbone of the business in US is small business, and they do a lot of business through their webstore. This is especially true for boutique brand in various vertical market.