Mixed Reports on Holiday Shopping

• According to the research of CardTrak, on an overall basis "the biggest shopping season of the year was a bust." Data from TeleCheck show that same store sales rose 2.4 percent above last year's level, well below the expected increase of four percent to six percent. Data from VISA show that the busiest day of the season was Friday, December 22 with more than $3.8 billion in sales, up 12.3 percent from last year's busiest day. Goldman Sachs reported that online shopping peaked in the week ending December 17 and was twice the weekly peak volume in 1999.

• E-commerce fared considerably better. On-line sales totaled $10.8 billion during the 2000 holiday shopping season, up 54% from 1999, according to Jupiter Research. About 36 million consumers made online purchases during the season, spending an average of $304. That's a 6% boost in sales per customer and a whopping 47% increase in the number of online customers, relative to one year earlier.

• Satisfaction with online shopping fell in eight out of ten categories from the 1999 Christmas season, according to data from Robertson Stephens. While major retailers, such as Walmart, Target and JC Penney, were successful in moving customers to their online stores, surveys of their customers revealed below-average customer satisfaction with that mode of shopping. A significant portion of respondents reported that they did not intend to repeat the experience.