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Holiday Shoppers Again Turn to Web

Holiday Shoppers Again Turn to Web

Online Consumer Sales for Week Ended Nov. 22 at $988M, Up 36 Percent From ’01 Figure

BY BRAD GRAVES

Staff Writer

Not all Christmas gift-giving will involve the slow parade through the shopping center parking lot behind several dozen taillights.

More shoppers are expected to go online this year.

Forrester Research, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., projects 4 million more households will shop online this year compared to 2001.

The market research firm also projects that online retail sales will hit $9.5 billion in the 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The rush to the electronic malls had already begun during November.

ComScore Networks reported consumer online spending in the week ended Nov. 17 was up from the previous week.

The Reston, Va., market research firm also reported the dollar amount of online sales grew compared to last year.

Online consumer retail sales for the week ended Nov. 22 were $988 million. The number is up 36 percent from the same week in 2001.

ComScore’s statistics are based on a cross-section of more than 1.5 million Internet users who have given the company permission to view their Web browsing, buying and other transaction behavior, including offline purchasing.

The market research firm found the greatest year-over-year gain was in home and garden purchases. Online shopping in the category was up 146 percent from the same week last year.

The firm also found:

– Online apparel and accessories purchases were up 66 percent from the same week last year.

– Online book sales were 31 percent greater than those in the year-ago period.

– Computer hardware sales were down 1 percent from the year ago period.

One of the most publicized recent events in online shopping has been Amazon.com’s decision to add apparel to its online store.

San Diego-based International Male and Undergear are marketing their clothing on the site.

Dawn Hobbs, manager of e-commerce marketing with International Male, said the company was pleased so far with the results of the Amazon.com partnership.

International Male and Undergear are units of publicly traded Hanover Direct, Inc. of Edgewater, N.J. The company noted last month that it expects Amazon to help it reach customers that its catalogs did not.

Those who work in shopping centers may take some solace in the notion that online shopping has its down side.

“Delivery remains online retail’s Achilles’ heel,” said a research brief released in mid- November by Forrester Research.

Its survey centered around European customers, but its findings could be applied domestically.

Forrester asked several questions about delivery. It found customers concerned about possible damage during shipping, the difficulty of returns and the cost of delivery.

Forrester determined the best customers for Internet retailers were the third of its sample that it has labeled the “controllers.”

Controllers are the people who prefer to set the date and time of the delivery so they can be home to get their package in person.

That group spends the most on online purchases, Forrester found.

International Male’s Hobbs said her preference this holiday season will be to shop online.

However, better prices and the limited availability of products would be enough to take her into retail stores, she said.

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