Retailers say online holiday sales remain strong
Online shoppers started buying on Thanksgiving and did not letup on so-called Cyber Monday, the day retailers designated for morediscounts and promotions. By 6 p.m. on Monday, Eastern time, saleswere 20 percent higher than during the same time period on theMonday after Thanksgiving a year ago, according to Coremetrics, aresearch firm owned by IBM that tracks online sales.
Cyber Monday was created five years ago to encourage people to shoponline from work, where they could use a high-speed Internetconnection that they lacked at home. it never was the busiestonline shopping day. But now that broadband Internet connectionshave replaced dial-up access in most U.S. homes, fewer consumersare waiting until they get to their work computers to shoponline.
The day has evolved into a way for online retailers to keep thespending that began in earnest on the day after Thanksgiving, knownas Black Friday, going.
In fact, Shop.org, the online arm of the National RetailFederation, a trade group, said the percentage of people shoppingonline from work on Monday was expected to drop more than 1percentage point from last year, to 12.1 percent.
“We saw a lot of companies jumping the gun by doing a Thursday-onlysale,” said Charlie Graham, the founder and chief executive ofShopItToMe.com, a personal shopping site that works with more than200 retailers. “There are still some retailers who did a differentdeal on Friday than on Monday,” Graham said, “and you’ll seeretailers who put a deal up Thursday through Monday.”
And yet, he said, there were enough shoppers who waited until theygot back to work on Monday to visit retail websites that CyberMonday is still relevant as a marketing tool.
The scene at the fulfillment center of Zappos.com, the online shoeretailer, in Louisville, Ky., offered physical evidence of thisyear’s online holiday shopping trends. to satisfy the demand, notonly did the company expand its warehouse to a second building, butZappos.com also plans to add 500 employees this week.
“It’s absolutely crazy,” Craig Adkins, the vice president forfulfillment operations, said early Monday afternoon. he said orderswere “significantly larger than we thought.”
At Target.com, books were discounted 60 percent, and the discountfor a JASTI Mini Projector – $50 for a savings of 50 percent – wasavailable all week, the company said.
Industry wide, online retail sales for the month through Nov. 26were up 13 percent, to $11.6 billion, according to comScore.Consumer spending – both online and in stores – increased 6 percentover the four-day weekend to an average of $365, according to asurvey of 4,300 Americans by the National Retail Federation.
Online retailers were careful to note that while the strength ofsales on Friday and Monday may be indicators of the season, theyare only the beginning. The peak shopping day for a number ofonline retailers comes in mid-December as shipping deadlinesapproach. many companies continue to offer deals like free shippingthroughout the holidays.
One of them, Amazon.com says the busiest day comes near the finalday of its free shipping offer for Christmas delivery.
On Monday morning, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com, Sally Fouts,described business as “very busy,” with hundreds of thousands ofpackages already shipped out of Amazon’s distribution center inPhoenix, where she was working. The biggest seller, as is the caseon most days, was the Kindle tablet reader, she said.
But like other retailers, Amazon.com also got an early start,offering its holiday discounts as early as October in itselectronics category. Thousands more deals were added on Friday,including a number of limited-time offers.
Fouts said that Amazon sold out of 47-inch Visio televisions, eachon sale on Monday for $600, or $300 off its list price.
Shoppers are increasingly using cell phones to shop online, whetherto buy products or simply to research. Shop.org said that itexpected around 7 percent of people to use their cell phones toshop on Monday, nearly double from last year.
Another relatively new phenomenon is the use by online retailers ofsocial media sites like Facebookto get the word out. Land’s end,for instance, created “12 hours of Twitter” on Monday, during whichit promoted its discounts, some of which were played up only onTwitter.
Related posts:
- Cyber Monday Pushes Strong Intraday Retail Sales Results; Mercent eCommerce Performance IndexTM Reporting Double-Digit Growth
- ISACA Survey: Employees Will Shop Less Online But Take Bigger Risks During 2010 Holiday Season
- PR-USA.net – Holiday hiring expected to be strong this year; Hound finds 53,000 jobs in retail.
- Online shoppers expected to spend £537million in ‘busiest internet shopping day of the year’
- Supervalu Launches Holiday Solutions – Industry Intelligence – Progressive Grocer
Written by Tim on December 1, 2010 under Work From Home Online.
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