Holiday Shoppers Start Early on Net
The Internet is turning holidays into shopping days. With malls and department stores closed on Thanksgiving, always-open online merchants got an early jump Thursday on the holiday spending binge.
Several e-retailers reported a sales spike Thursday evening, in the lull after holiday dinners and televised football games that were punctuated with commercial breaks advertising dot-com companies.
“You have all this pent-up demand on Thanksgiving Day and you can only eat turkey and talk about shopping for so long,” said Tracie Reed, vice president of merchandising for CDNow Inc. “And people begin to wonder if they really want to get up at 6 a.m. and fight the traffic at the malls.”
Still, online spending was slower on Thanksgiving than on a typical weekday--purchases fell by 16% compared with the prior Thursday and were 26% lower than the day before. Of course, most brick-and-mortar retailers saw their sales dive to zero on Thanksgiving.
Observers said the day’s festivities and travel plans kept many people away from their home computers. And most people who do shopping at their workplaces weren’t online Thursday.
“It looks like sales actually dropped on Thanksgiving, compared to both last Thursday and to Wednesday,” said Annette Gleneicki, director of new-product development at BizRate.com, which surveys shoppers at more than 2,200 online retailers.
The drop-off is similar to last year, when Internet-based holiday shopping slowed during the Thanksgiving weekend, picking up on Sunday, Gleneicki said.
But BizRate’s figures are not broken down on an hourly basis, and some online retailers said business picked up late in the day, when people who wanted to buy gifts had nowhere else to turn. And the momentum carried over to Friday as well, some online retailers said.
“There are a whole bunch of people at work today shopping,” said Dave Rochlin, chief operating officer of Emeryville, Calif.-based online movie retailer Reel.com Inc., which is seeing strong demand for soon-to-be-released DVDs from Disney, including “The Little Mermaid” and “The Jungle Book.”
Three-quarters of Reel.com’s sales this holiday season are for DVDs (as opposed to videocassettes), compared with less than half at this time last year, Rochlin said.
Shopping online will reach as much as $15 billion during the holidays, or half the year’s sales, according to Ernst & Young.
While brick-and-mortar retailers had to cope with the hectic crowds, the online stores had a relatively peaceful Friday.
“I’m used to having thousands of stores calling me and saying, ‘I’m out of this and this is moving,’ ” said Reed, who joined CDNow earlier this year from the country’s largest traditional music retailer, Musicland Stores Corp. “Here, it’s kind of anticlimactic to sit in my office and watch my computer monitor.”
But Bloomberg News reported that KBkids.com, operated by Consolidated Stores Corp., turned some shoppers away because the site was overloaded and offered a $5-off coupon as a consolation. Shoppers were drawn to the site by newspaper circulars from KB Toys, said Srikant Srinivasan, chief executive of KBkids.com.
KBkids.com is adding more computer servers and taking other steps to improve its site in the coming weeks, Srinivasan said. The company is implementing software to store information on the site so shoppers can move around the Web pages more quickly.
* IT’S A HABIT: Shoppers love that rush the day after Thanksgiving. A1
