“Best Holiday Season Ever” Actually Worst Holiday Season Ever
by John Paczkowski
Posted on December 30, 2008 at 3:42 PM PT
The 2008 holiday shopping season was one of the worst on record for the e-commerce sector–despite Amazon’s (AMZN) “best-holiday-season” ever pronouncements. Online retail spending declined three percent year-over-year, according to comScore (SCOR), which had expected sales to remain flat for the period beginning Nov. 1 and ending Dec. 23– the last day to purchase online with the possibility of delivery by Christmas Eve.
Online spending during this same period in 2007 topped out at $26.33 billion. In 2008, it fell to $25.53 billion.
“This marks the first time we’ve seen negative growth rates for the holiday season since we began tracking e-commerce in 2001,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “The combination of having five fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the severe economic headwinds faced by consumers has made this a really tough season for retailers, both offline and online.”
Obviously. Online spending for the fourth quarter–Oct. 1 to Dec. 28–is even worse than that of the holiday season. It fell four percent year-over-year to 36.8 billion, marking the first full quarter to record a negative growth rate since comScore first began tracking e-commerce.
Comments
Definitely a rough year for retailers. I would say, though that unit volume was likely up from last year while discounts and falling prices on big ticket items pulled total revenues down.
Posted by Karl Quist at December 30th, 2008 at 5:04 pmThe names of the companies that actually saw an increase in online sales, despite the bad economy, don’t come as a big surprise–they’re the ones that do the best job of catering to consumer demand.
A post on the Marketing Doctor’s blog discussed Amazon’s success:
“Amazon has this strength because from the beginning they have built themselves around the consumers’ experience.”
Posted by elo sloane at January 3rd, 2009 at 4:40 pm