A Merry Christmas Shopping Season for E-tailers and Retailers

U.S. merchants closed out the year with a holiday shopping season that surpassed expectations.   Not surprisingly, retail spending over the Internet posted eye-popping growth.    Jupiter Communications, an Internet research firm, estimates that on-line spending during the 1999 holiday shopping season topped $6 billion, nearly double the figure for 1998.   A survey conducted by Goldman Sachs and PC Data Online found that holiday shoppers across the U.S. spent $2.1 billion on-line during the last two weeks before Christmas.   Some individual e-commerce portals did even better.  Yahoo reported a 385 percent increase in orders transacted through its sites between November 25 and December 25

Interestingly, much on-line shopping was directed toward the e-commerce divisions of established brick-and-mortar stores.  Media Metrix, Inc., a New York-based firm that tracks web-site traffic reported that during the 5 weeks leading up to Christmas, nearly half of the 50 most-visited sites were associated with established firms such as Toys R Us, J.C. Penney, Sears, and Wal Mart Stores.  Forrester Research Inc. estimated that 72% of on-line purchases during the 1999 holiday shopping season would be made by  experienced on-line shoppers, 25% by consumers who had considered buying on-line the previous Christmas but decided against it, and 3% by first-time buyers.

Despite the explosion in demand for e-commerce, the venerable shopping mall fared very well during the 1999 Holiday shopping season.  Early indications from Telecheck Services, the check authorization firm, are that retailer same-store sales between the day after Thanksgiving and December 26, 1999 were up 6.2 percent over the previous year, the biggest jump in sales in the past 10 years.  The National Retail Federation estimates that retail sales for the last two months of 1999 may have climbed as much as 7 percent over the previous year.