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To: Larry S. who wrote (49911)	12/3/2003 9:00:03 AM
From: Kelvin Taylor	Respond to of 53068

still time to buy AMZN? Online Holiday Sales Seen Hitting Higher Targets Tue Dec 2, 8:39 PM ET SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - If Internet shoppers' early enthusiasm for holiday buying is any indication, online retailers appear to be in for a more prosperous holiday season, analysts and key industry players said on Tuesday. Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said preliminary reports suggest that the overall online retail industry will hit her forecast for November and December sales of $16.8 billion, a 21 percent increase from a year earlier. Last year, 54 million people made online purchases. That number is expected to hit 64 million for 2003, and those 10 million first-time Web shoppers are expected to account for almost all the growth in this year's holiday sales, Freeman Evans said. As more people go online, Web users are getting increasingly comfortable with the medium and it is taking less time to convert surfers into shoppers. "People who haven't been online before are shopping earlier because they know people who have done it," Freeman Evans said. MSN, the online division of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news), said it saw a 50 percent increase in consumer spending and site traffic in November compared with a year earlier. The shoppers turned out ahead of retailing's blockbuster "Black Friday" -- the post-Thanksgiving shopping day that is known for putting brick-and-mortar stores in the black -- lured by such offers as free shipping and discounts on everything from Calphalon cookware to cashmere sweaters, said Lisa Gurry, lead product manager for MSN. Gurry did not disclose MSN's sales or traffic figures. Over Thanksgiving weekend, America Online shopping's overall traffic was up more than 24 percent over the same period last year, a company spokeswoman said. America Online is a division of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news)