Online retail sales seen at $20.2 bln in 1999-survey
NEW YORK, Sept 28 (Reuters) - U.S. online retail sales should reach $20.2 billion this year as seven million Internet shoppers make their first electronic commerce purchases, a Forrester Research Inc. survey said on Tuesday.
A separate survey on holiday shopping said most shoppers would use emerging e-commerce businesses rather than Websites tied to department stores or catalogs, Greenfield Online said.
Greenfield's survey said 70 percent of Internet users planned to do some or all of their holiday shopping online with Amazon.com (NasdaqNM:AMZN - news), CDnow (NasdaqNM:CDNW - news) and eToys Inc. (NasdaqNM:ETYS - news) being the main destinations, while the Websites of the world's largest specialty toy retailer, Toys R Us Inc. (NYSE:TOY - news), was ranked fourth.
The Internet is reshaping how people shop and how businesses offer merchandise to appeal to the estimated 17 million households shopping online by the year's end, Forrester Research said.
An estimated 49 million U.S. households will spend $184 billion online by 2004 and will drive a new type of retailer that is savvy about using customer information, Forrester said.
''Post-Web retailers will need to do more than just sell everything to anyone,'' said Seema Williams, consumer e-commerce analyst at Forrester.
''To succeed, they must anticipate customer demand, expand their product and service offerings into adjacent categories and simultaneously sell through multiple retail channels, including stores, catalogs, call centers, Web sites, interactive TV and mobile devices. None of today's merchants are prepared for post-Web retail.''
The key element to becoming a post-Web retailer would be a consolidated customer view to anticipate the needs of shoppers by knowing their purchasing history and other information, Forrester said.
Also, retailers would form alliances to broaden their reach or define the most profitable customers.
''Consolidation will reshape the post-Web retail landscape as merchants expand into complementary product categories,'' Williams added.
Although online retail sales would continue to soar over the next five years, Forrester expected the number of online shoppers in the United States to level off at around 50 million households.
The amount spent online was expected to increase to $3,738 in 2004 from $1,167 in 1999, Forrester added.
Greenfield said in its survey that compact discs were expected to be the most widely purchased item, followed by books and computer software, respectively. Toys could overtake computer software this year, the Greenfield survey of 4,849 computer users said.
While the main reasons people said they would do holiday shopping online relate to convenience and avoiding crowds, 60 percent believed they could find the lowest price online and 44 percent expected to find hard-to-find items over the Internet, Greenfield said.
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