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Microcap & Penny Stocks : TSIG.com TIGI (formerly TSIG) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ong Dien who wrote (10866)	12/4/1998 11:30:00 AM
From: AJ Berger	Read Replies (7) \| Respond to of 44908

Good News if TSIG can Capitalize on it... This from zdnet.com (no more death threats for dissing this stock, OK?) That blizzard I see outside my window isn't a holiday snowstorm. It's a swirl of press releases burying me in a big pile of hype from pundits, online malls, and Web portals proclaiming that this is the moment when online shopping becomes "real." Let's see what they have to say. Jupiter Communications is forecasting online holiday sales at $2.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion last year, and says that "commerce players can upsell [I hate that word] self-buyers into gift buyers." Jupiter recommends that sites start building gift registries, something that online record stores such as CDNow have started to do. I suppose that could work, but the concept doesn't exactly bowl me over. And by the way, did you know that we're just finishing up National Online Shopping Week? Well, we are. Five organizations, including shop.com and the Association for Interactive Media, came up with that bright idea. Even ZDNet, from my own company, couldn't resist adding to the press release pile: "The Web will become a major holiday shopping channel this season, underscoring Web users' increasing propensity to make online credit card purchases. According to the October InternetTrak survey sponsored by Ziff-Davis' ZDNet, 68 million U.S. adults used the Web during the past three months, and 6.4 million of them plan to do some of their holiday shopping online." Meanwhile, America Online's big holiday press release says that "20 percent of shoppers purchasing on AOL are first-time buyers; converting 'window shoppers' to first-time buyers is a key retail strategy this holiday season." AOL goes on to toss out one statistic that I don't believe: "AOL anticipates its average shopper will make more than one-third of his or her total holiday purchases online this year." That seems wildly optimistic, but I guess come January, I'll receive another flurry of press releases with headlines along the lines of "Online Holiday Shopping Exceeds All Expectations; Dancing in Streets Ensues." There's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy going on here. Many, many interested parties are depending on the success of online retailing to make their businesses real, so they're all putting out these press releases saying how successful online shopping already is in order to convince unconnected people like my mother that they're missing the exciting online-shopping boat. How about a reality check? Guess how much Americans will spend during the holiday season? $174 billion. So even if they do spend $2.3 billion of it online, that's still just a drop in the proverbial bucket. Yes, online shopping will be bigger this holiday season than ever, but duh, how could it not be? That's hardly a daring prediction. And it certainly doesn't justify the utterly insane stock price run-ups we've been seeing for online retailers and auction sites such as eBay and Amazon.com lately. Here's hoping that no one puts out a press release in January saying online holiday shopping was disappointing; if that happens, I can guarantee you'll see those stocks plummet. When it comes to the Internet, the stock market seems to be especially susceptible to the promises of press releases. Yes, someday my mother and 60 million other people like her will shop online, but it's increasingly obvious that certain forces are trying to rush them into doing that now now now. I think that's because many of the companies involved in online shopping are built on precarious financial foundations, and they simply can't wait five years for this trend to take off. It has to happen now or the shareholders will start to ask too many questions. Very interesting times. I guess deep down we've always known that the Internet would turn into a vast shopping mall, but I wouldn't have guessed that so many would push so hard to try to make it happen so fast.