Report: Economy May be Slow, but Online Sales are Going Strong
Given the current economic climate, everybody is looking for some positive news, and according to the latest data from online metrics service Compete, the top online retailers in the U.S. are faring quite well during this holiday season. Compete looked at the statistics for total unique visitors to the top ten online retail sites and found that they are significantly ahead of last year's performance.
Compete also specifically looked at Amazon, which had about 460 million unique visitors during all of last year's holiday season. This year, Amazon already surpassed this number around December 10th.
It is important to point out, however, that not every site is doing so well. Just yesterday, Compete listed some of the biggest winners and losers among online retailers during the first two weeks of December. While the online photo service Snapfish, for example, saw its business grow by 57%, its competitor Shutterfly saw its traffic decline slightly by -1% (though chances are that Oprah effect played a significant role here as well). Abercrombie.com lost over 23%, Blockbuster 22%, and 123inkjets.com 86%. The popular online electronics retailer Newegg.com, on the other hand, saw its traffic grow by almost 100%.
While a lot of daily traffic itself doesn't necessarily translate into great sales, Compete's data fits in well with a recent report from CitiGroup (pdf), which reported a healthy growth at Amazon and Buy.com in December 1-15 sales, though this growth was mostly driven by advertising and aggressive discounting. JupiterResearch also came to a similar conclusion earlier this month.
We will have to wait until the end of the holiday shopping season to draw any final conclusions from this data (especially with regards to actual sales), but so far, it looks like at least the larger online retailers might be bucking the overall economic trends.
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Solid data... This simply adds to my theory that AMZN is one of the most attractive buys in the current market slump.
Frederic, thank you for the information. I wrote a response to this post at Thinking Space. As you said, there is always bright spot even in the coldest winter.
Yihong
I am an online etailer. I sell books, games, and DVDs on Amazon, eBay, my own website, and several other venues. And sales are up this year. Not as much as last year. But they are up over 10%. I was waiting for the slump to hit, but so far it hasn't. I'm a little worried about Jan thru April, which were very strong months in 2008. I'm crossing my fingers that 1st qtr 2009 will be just as good as 2008.
Number of visitors maybe up, but what about the sales figures?
What I see across multiple e-commerce sites under my watch is that the traffic is holding or growing, but people are buying less. Many more abandoned or unpaid shopping carts.
@mukzz - Thanks for you comment. I have heard anecdotes about the rise in abandoned shopping carts this season and was going to include it in this post, but I couldn't find any hard data to cite.
Its great to hear that online shopping is still going strong! I recently wrote a post recently about how to improve your online sales without having to lower prices - might be worth a read for people interested in this type of thing....
http://rich-page.com/website-optimization/7-ways-to-improve-ecommerce-sites-and-sell-like-its-black-friday-everyday-without-reducing-your-prices/
Rich Page (a website optimizer fanatic)
Looks great. Let's see what the holiday season rally will be like. Jan 3rd would be a good guideline.
People are hoping online to search for deals. This trend will only continue to grow. Plus, if you can collect leads/subscribers and give them useful deals, you will position yourself well to reap the rewards of the surge.