Search Marketing Blog
A Dickens of a Holiday Selling Season
Posted by Sean McMahon on 12.27.2007In blog post earlier this month, I noted that this holiday selling season was shaping-up to be “The Best of Times” for online retailers, and “The Worst of Times” of brick-and-motor retailers. Sure enough, this Charles Dickens reference played-out this past week, as reported by eMarketer in its report released today titled “Online Holiday Sales Ho-Ho-Hold Up“.
This report revealed that the early numbers for the holiday season are lackluster, at best, for real-world retailers, and up substantially for their online counterparts, as shown in the following chart.
Citing reasons such as high gasoline prices, depressed home values, and decreasing stock prices, eMarketer is reporting that brick-and-mortar retailers saw a growth of only 2.4% compared to last year’s selling season. In addition, the market research company stated that this small increase was realized through the substantial discounting of retail prices.
Conversely, online sales during the 2007 holiday buying season posted a 22.4% gain compared to last year’s season, as reported by eMarketer. In addition, comScore Networks confirms this impressive sales surge in a report stating that online retail sales increased more than 19% versus last year, to a record $26.2 billion during November 1, 2007 through December 21, 2007.
From this eMarketer article, Ron LaPierre of PriceGrabber.com summed-up this favorable Dickens scenario by stating, “The Internet is still acquiring new users and new shoppers”.
