Click Away: Holiday Web Shopping Bounces Back
by Peter Kafka
Posted on November 29, 2009 at 11:51 AM PT
I don’t get “Black Friday,” and I don’t get the people who actually spend Black Friday at the mall. (Also, when did “doorbuster” become part of the argot? I missed the memo on that one.) I do get the people who do their holiday shopping online, though, and there are more of them every day.
Here are the latest numbers from comScore (SCOR), which says that online holiday shopping is up a bit this year. That’s not saying a lot considering that last year’s sales were soft. But for the record, sales are up three percent so far, and Web sales were up 11 percent on Black Friday.
But note that consumers say they’re spending less overall than they did less year: They told interviewers they intend to spend eight percent less than in 2008.
Not surprisingly, people spent a whole lot of time on the Web’s most popular retail sites on Friday: Traffic at Amazon (AMZN), Wal-Mart (WMT), Apple (AAPL), Target (TGT) and Best Buy (BBY) sites were all up, comScore reports.
Next up: Dutiful reporting on “Cyber Monday,” tomorrow’s artificial construct. Still, I’m not complaining. This is way better than trudging out to the mall for the annual “interview of shoppers in a parking lot” piece that newspapers still insist on assigning.
