Amazon sees traffic surge, a bright spot in grim retail season |
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Amazon sees traffic surge, a bright spot in grim retail season
The good news keeps piling up for Amazon.com today.
Internet research firm comScore says the number of unique visitors to Amazon sites from Dec. 1 to Dec. 24 -- the height of the holiday shopping season -- surged 7 percent from the corresponding period in 2007, to 76.2 million.
Amazon's strong traffic numbers come at a time when overall holiday ecommerce spending was down 3 percent, according to comScore.
“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.”
Many of the other major retail sites slowed in the December period, with eBay, Target, and JCPenny seeing traffic shrink, the comScore data show. EBay, however, was first in unique visitors with 85.4 million unique visitors.
Along with Amazon, Apple and Hewlett-Packard showed strong traffic growth, up 19 percent and 28 percent, respectively. Wal-mart was up 4 percent.
Earlier today, Amazon topped a shopper satisfaction survey of online retail sites.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon's traffic surge correlates to strong sales. The company a few days ago declared the 2008 holiday shopping season its "best ever" but provided few details -- apparently leaving that to its fourth quarter financials. Still unclear is how all the holiday discounts and consumer frugality affected Amazon's bottom line.
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