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To: Mark Fowler who wrote (30302)	12/17/1998 10:34:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Respond to of 164684

Mark, Do you know if we could buy some shares in Forrester research inc? I'd love to own a Co that knows so F-----g much. >>REUTERS December 17, 1998 NEW YORK -- Internet sales are racing ahead. Wall Street analysts are huffing and puffing to keep track. But the federal government has barely left the starting gate in providing data on the hottest new sales arena since the Home Shopping Network. Since consumer spending fuels two-thirds of the economy, economists keep close track of consumers' shopping habits. As more and more sales take place over the Internet, some analysts worry that their traditional gauges for measuring retail sales may become less useful or less accurate. Based on reports from retailers and anecdotal evidence, Internet shopping is exploding and will continue to grow as consumers opt to browse the Web for holiday gifts and purchases at other times of the year. But the Commerce Department, which releases a monthly report on retail sales, has no detailed figures on purchases in cyberspace. It instead lumps them into the broader category of mail-order sales, a category that also includes home shopping via television and purchases from catalogs. Another sticking point is that mail-order sales figures are delayed by a month. "It's hard to isolate those types of (Internet) sales," said Michael Niemira, an economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. "It's a problem we will have to deal with, and -- increasingly -- it will become more of a problem until Commerce decides to track (Internet sales) better." The numbers vary, but private firms that track shopping over the Internet say they expect consumers to spend $3.5 billion this holiday season shopping on the World Wide Web, triple the 1997 amount, and about $7 billion for all of 1998. The Commerce Department, which always struggles to keep up with the rapidly changing economy, plans to rename the mail-order category "electronic shopping" in 2001. "We're doing our best to capture (Internet sales)," said Nancy Piesto, chief of the monthly retail survey at the Commerce Department's Census Bureau. "We're following what is going on. We're taking steps to capture them." "We try to add new businesses to keep the samples as up to date as possible," she said, noting the bureau updates its samples every quarter. Piesto said some sales are reflected in the clothing category, since the department does not distinguish between sales by The Gap, for instance, at one of its stores or its online site. At the same time, buying airline tickets -- a big chunk of online sales -- or dealing with online brokerage houses would not be recorded since they are considered services. "There's a lot going on on the Internet that is not retail," Piesto said. Crandall and others noted that while Internet shopping is growing quickly it still accounts for just a fraction of total retail sales, which were $229 billion in November. But cyberspace shopping could explode in coming years. Forrester Research Inc. projects revenues from Internet shopping at $108 billion by the year 2003, which it said would account for 6 percent of domestic consumer spending.