Christmas
E-Commerce Reaches New Levels
Over 10 billion sold!
Sun Review Jan. 8, 2000
Market research firm Mediametrix Inc (www.mediametrix.com) measures the preferences of online shoppers. This Christmas season, the top 3 Internet destinations during the run-up to Christmas were Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc. and eToys Inc. Traditional retailers with online operations also fared well in the survey. Barnesandnoble.com, the bookseller, ranked fourth while toysrus.com, the online equivalent of Toys R Us, followed closely. Mediametrix also found that online shopping reached an all-time peak during the second week of December. E-commerce traffic was up 27% during Christmas week compared to the same week last year. All in all, 1999 is considered a banner year for holiday-related e-commerce.
America Online Inc. of Dulles, Va., which operates AOL Canada Inc. as a joint venture with Royal Bank of Canada, announced that holiday spending online by its 20 million members more than doubled from 1998. AOL members spent $2.5-billion (US) online for Christmas 1999, compared with $1.2-billion (US) in 1998. For the year, AOL's members, including 135,000 in Canada, spent $10-billion (US) online.
Sears.ca, the e-commerce site of Sears Canada Inc., reported it was selling about $1-million of merchandise a week through its site. While that is still a drop in the bucket compared with Sears' store operations, it was a huge year-over-year improvement. Sears sold more online in December than its online operations did in all of 1998. And where Sears had 400 items consumers could choose from online in 1998, it had 10,000 items up for sale online in 1999.
Other notable gainers during Christmas week were electronic greetings sites such as Bluemountain.com (+82%, with an incredible 1,427,000 average daily unique visitors for the week), Hollywood Online, where users can look for information about new movie releases (+64%, with 69,000 avg. daily unique visitors), and Claus.com, a site devoted to Christmas (+38 percent with 55,000 avg. daily unique visitors)
On January 3rd, 2000, Ernst & Young scaled back its sales expectations for Internet retailing for mid-October through the end of December to between $10-billion and $13-billion (US), down from previous forecasts of $12-billion (US) to $15-billion (US).
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TOP 10 E-COMMERCE SITES FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON: 1 Amazon.com
5,693,000 visitors |
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