Well, the Online Retailers got through the first week of our holiday season in pretty good shape. A few reported performance issues made the news, but no major meltdowns. How did the first week end up? From a sales perspective, good but not great. Comscore is reporting sales $4.06 Billion in online sales for the week ending November 30th. For the month of November, $13.43 Billion. So, Cyber Monday, at $733 Million in online sales represents about 18% of the week and about 6% of the month. Impressive, but not overwheliming. In fact, they are reporting the 3 days following Cyber Monday all resulting in online sales over $700 million.
We reported on Cyber Monday Customer Satisfaction last week, and within the next day or two we will give you an update on satisfaction for the week. It will be interesting to see if satisfaction continues its trend of outperforming 2006 results.
Online sales were up year over year, 18% for the month of November, 18% for the week following Thanksgiving and 21% for Cyber Monday. Again, good but not great.
So why good and not great? A couple of possible reasons.
- No super hot product to drive sales early in the holiday season (although Amazon seemed to try to make the Kindle the hot product, but it would appear without major success - I personally know of nobody that has bought one -- and most of the people I know do read).
- Aggressive discounting and free shipping offers. This will drive sales, but at lower dollars.
- Some major retailers still had performance problems - it might drive you to another site or it might drive you to the store.
We will keep a close eye on satisfaction scores and online sales over the remaining weeks of the holiday season.
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