Holiday shopping online gets a year older…
Just a handful of years ago, there was not an option for purchasing Christmas goodies online. If you wanted to avoid the holiday rush at the local mall, you had to either outsource the shopping to a relative, or use a catalog. With an impressive hockey-stick growth curve, people are now hunting for those bargains online. Retailers are getting more sophisticated in their approach because they can offer a few low priced items as bait, and then deliver coupons to drive traditional traffic as the payoff. As noted below, the interesting thing is that the largest sales day by volume comes within a couple of weeks of Christmas. No surprise there, being a guy, I can tell you that my gender tends to think about presents for weeks, and then at the last minute, jump online and do all the ordering at once to avoid the crowds. Maybe the bigger news here is that e-commerce as a channel continues to garner more trust and is becoming a natural part of purchasing. For me, it is the first place I go when I need a part to repair something around the house. Last week my mower broke so I made a trip to the repair place only to be told they could not order the part. I was mad at myself for even wasting the time. I went home and had the part ordered in about 4 minutes. A shame the repair place has not figured out Google yet. Here are a few good statistics from the MIT Technology Review:
- Raul Vazquez, chief executive of Walmart.com, expected 7 million visits to the site Monday, up from more than 5.5 million a year ago. As of mid-afternoon, plenty of items had already sold out, including $448 1-carat diamond earrings, $38 toy workbenches from Step2, and $10 Thomas the Tank Engine toys.
- There were some snags. The heavy traffic overwhelmed an e-commerce service offered by Yahoo Inc., preventing consumers from completing purchases at thousands of Web sites Monday. The outages began late in the morning on the East Coast and continued for at least four more hours, Yahoo spokeswoman Kristen Wareham said. The problems affected more than half of the roughly 40,000 sites that subscribe to Yahoo’s ”merchant solutions” service, which costs $39.95 per month plus a 1.5 percent sales commission.
- While the first Monday after Thanksgiving kicks off the online holiday shopping season, it’s not the busiest day for retailers, according to ComScore. Last year, the busiest online shopping day was Wednesday, Dec. 13, generating $667 million in sales. The Monday after Thanksgiving was actually the 12th busiest day in terms of sales for the 2006 holiday season.
The interesting Website of the day is: EntropiaUniverse.com — So most of us have heard of, or maybe even seen, something about Second Life, but EntropiaUniverse is not to be forgotten. This virtual world based out of Europe called ‘Vegas in space’ by the Mercury News is a fast paced sci-fi game with real world economics built right in. In fact, the banking system in game was sold to five licenses for more than $400,000. Just like Second Life, you can make real world money in game, but that means you can lose it investing in real estate too.