Online holiday shopping up a whopping 19%
According to a recent blog posting on the San Francisco Chronicle technology blogs, online spending to the tune of $28 billion during the period of November 1 through December 27 in 2007 was up a stunning 19% over 2006. Oddly, the pundits are citing this as a weakness because spending was expected to be significantly higher (percentage wise), as it has proven to be in the previous years. I don't know where you get your retail sales projections, but where I get mine, 19% growth is head snappingly healthy.
Since the holiday spending growth rate in 2006 was 26% higher than the same period in 2005, I suppose there is some comparative analysis warranted, but get real ... online spending is high and getting higher each year.
The world of technology and the Internet is one in which rapid growth, major breakthroughs and quantum leaps in productivity have become the norm. Remember Moore's Law? Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years. The practical effect on the street is that personal computer processing power effectively doubled every two years for a long period of time. In practical terms, however, there are limits to this theory and nowadays doubling the number of gigahertz of a computer's processing speed does not yield quite the same results as it did when we dealt in megahertz in the past.
Similarly, online retail sales will probably climb at a healthy rate for several years to come, but at some point this growth will level off, at least in terms of percentage growth.
So does this mean that mom and pop should fold up their retail shop on main street because Amazon is going to clean their clock? I think not. Mom and pop can get a piece of this online pie by putting up their own website and selling to a wider audience. After all, e-commerce works both ways. Just ask our own Bob Laffranchi at Loleta Cheese how much of his sales derive from the web compared to years past. The bottom line is if you have a good product or service, customers will buy from you.
I always try to buy locally first, and I'll even spend a few dollars more to do so. But sometimes you've just GOT to have that Wolferman's English muffin, and if the Co-op won't carry it, UPS will. Mmmmm ... Wolferman's.
Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com
Logo credit = Main Street Mall Online