“With the holiday-buying season behind us, we’re left with one inescapable truth: the Internet has become an integral part of holiday shopping,” said Charles Buchwalter, vice president of media research at Jupiter Media Metrix. “Unlike 2000, when online shopping started strong but then fell off, online shopping this year started strong and ended even stronger.”
“We’ve been waiting for the inevitable dominance of the traditional retailers over their pureplay counterparts, and it appears that 2001 may have been the year when it finally happened,” said Ken Cassar, senior Jupiter Research analyst. “With a few exceptions such as Amazon, the dominant retailers that sell merchandise directly from their sites tend to be affiliated with brick-and-mortar stores and catalogues. In fact, traffic to the seven traditional retailers among the top 15 shopping sites for the entire 2001 shopping season increased 73% versus last year.”
Traffic to shopping sites in the week after Christmas fell by 9% compared to the season average but the Jupiter Media Metrix Online Shopping Index (which aggregates visitors to over 500 US retail sites) was up 61% on the same week last year.
