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Anyone Have a Good Black Friday Besides Amazon?

How much did you spend on Friday, and where did you spend it?

We’re likely to see flash analysis of today’s shopping binge before the weekend is over. But J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan has already called a winner for the holiday: Amazon.

Khan’s firm commissioned a study of 766 U.S. consumers about their holiday shopping plans, and 44 percent of them say they’ll be spending less this year. And those that say they’re cutting back say they’ll cut back a lot–an average of 41 percent from previous years.

So Khan figures that overall, holiday shopping will be down “high single-digits to low double-digits” compared to last year.

But there’s one-in-two chance that when you do shop, you’re going to end up buying something at Amazon (AMZN), Khan says:

Nearly 50 percent of respondents plan to shop at Amazon.com this holiday season, and Amazon’s reach is 39 percent higher than its nearest competitor.

Amazon continues to pull in very high percentages of users earning more than $100K, with 59 percent of shoppers in that income category saying they had shopped there; no other site’s reach among that group was above 33 percent.”

And while I’m in lemonades-out-of-lemon mode, I’ll note that Khan also predicts that e-commerce spending will be flat over the holidays.

Given that we saw two reports over the last week (one from MasterCard, another from ComScore) that said that e-commerce was already shrinking compared to last year, that would be good news indeed.

Comments

  1. Since no one clicked the Amazon affiliate link on my website, I therefor conclude that no one shopped at amazon.com today. Contrary to what the various numbers show.

    Posted by Ken Funk at November 28th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
  2. I think if Amazon found a way to make shopping for clothing easier, that would convince a whole slew of people to shop more online. Something like what Apple did with MP3s—they made it idiot proof and are now reaping the benefits. Right now the masses just can’t imagine buying clothes online because they see the whole returning and not being able to try on as a big hassle (which it is).

    Posted by Carlos Portocarrero at December 1st, 2008 at 7:31 am

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