US online shopping passes £7bn
Published: 24 Dec 2002 09:30 GMT
Shoppers continued to hit the Net as the holiday shopping season headed into the final lap, spending $11.35bn (about £7.2bn) in the US between 1 November and last week.
That number -- an increase of about 40 percent from the same period last year -- comes from shopping comparison site BizRate, which surveys consumers as they finish making purchases. BizRate has about 2,000 stores in its database.
The figures arrive amid a discouraging season for retail in general. Major retailers including Wal-Mart, Federated Department Stores and Kmart all noted that sales for the holiday season would be at the low end of their forecasts, or miss them altogether.
In the UK, more than seven percent fewer Christmas shoppers visited major retail centres on the last weekend before Christmas than a year ago, data compilers Footfall Index say.
And even when they do shop, consumers are looking for bargains, said Helen Malani, director of corporate communications at BizRate. She noted that 37 percent of shoppers surveyed last week said they were influenced by free-shipping deals.
"We've seen a lot of deals this year, and consumers have been responding," she said. "Consumers have been very deal-centric, and e-tailers and retailers have been offering a lot of deals for them."
Top categories this year include the stalwarts of online shopping: books, music and videos. But apparel has made a strong showing, with consumers spending $1.83bn online, a hair under the $1.86bn for books, music and videos, between 2 November and 13 December, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings, Harris Interactive and Goldman Sachs.
The rest of the top five was made up of travel, with $1.5bn in sales; consumer electronics, with $1.2bn; and toys and video games, with $1.19bn.
"These top five categories cover nearly two-thirds of all consumers spending online, and e-tailers with a focus on these product categories are poised to benefit," Harris Interactive e-commerce research director Lori Iventosch-James said in a release.
Individual retailers have been reporting strong figures. Overstock.com said last week that sales in the first two weeks of December hit $16.6m, up from $5.7m in the previous year.
And Amazon.com's "Delight-o-meter", which tracks orders placed through the company's Web sites and through its partnerships, registered 55.4m units as of Sunday, about 30 percent higher than a year ago at that time.
But while the festive season gets people focussed more on shopping, as Christmas gets closer, people spend more time out of the house or the office, and less time online. And most online retailers' deadline for Christmas shipping have now passed, meaning that online spending should start to decline.
Consumers hit the online stores early, said Carrie Johnson of Forrester Research, which has predicted that consumers would spend $9.5bn online between Thanksgiving and Christmas. According to a Shop.org/BizRate study, one-third of online shoppers had finished or nearly finished their shopping by 3 December.
Deutsche Bank analyst Jeetil Patel noted that product listings at eBay US last week fell by 10 percent week-over-week, erasing the 10 percent gain of the previous seven-day period. "We expect US listings to decline next week in anticipation of Christmas, as both buyers and sellers spend time away from the Internet," he wrote.
And Pacific Crest analyst Steve Weinstein noted that, while Amazon's Delight-o-meter is showing strong sales, "a blowout is unlikely".
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