SHLD customers would rather peruse their website rather than schlep out to tour their prized real estate?
I don't believe either one of these stats from two very shady sources. They probably locked methamphetamine-induced employees up in a room filled with cartons of Pall Malls and internet linked computers with the home page set to their respective sites
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Cyber Monday Traffic a Mixed Bag
The numbers from Cyber Monday – the first workday after Thanksgiving, when Americans are supposed to buy holiday gifts online – are starting to come in. So far the results are mixed: One market watcher says that traffic is down from last year, another says it was up.
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Online stores weren’t exactly mobbed on Monday
Hitwise says that the number of U.S. visits to the top 500 retail Web sites decreased 1% from Cyber Monday 2007. Nielsen Online says that traffic to the 120 or so retail sites it tracks climbed 10%. The difference is due to the companies’ methodologies: Hitwise counts the total number of visits a site receives, Nielsen counts the number of unique visitors.
Neither company claims to know how much people spent during these visits, which is probably the most important metric. Silicon Alley Insider cites a survey of marketing execs from online retailers that says sales were up 2.4% compared with 2007. Also, Cyber Monday, despite the hype, isn’t the busiest online shopping day so it’s way too early to panic.
Still, retailers have to be disappointed. This year, many companies had big Cyber Monday promotions in effort to lure shoppers. Target, for example, is offering discounts on 1,500 products online, and expected traffic to be up about 40% from 2007, the Journal reported Monday. But the number of visitors decreased 10% from 2007, according to Hitwise, and was only up 7% according to Nielsen.
There were some winners: Amazon.com’s Cyber-Monday traffic jumped more than 20% by both measures. And the number of unique visitors to Sears.com was up 58% compared with 2007, although some of those people may have wanted to do their shopping Friday when the site was down for several hours.
-Ben Worthen
Image: Reuters
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