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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Cool Entertainment (CULE) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Lutz who wrote (118)	3/22/1999 5:47:00 PM
From: burner	Respond to of 488

Interesting article in the NY Times: March 22, 1999 COMPRESSED DATA Survey Suggests Consumers Are Taking to E-Commerce By STEVE LOHR ew evidence that the rise of electronic commerce is a wave, not a bubble, comes from Odyssey, a market research firm. In survey results to be released today, Odyssey found that half of the American households online are now making purchases over the Internet, and that the total number of online purchases in the last six months jumped fourfold from the comparable period a year earlier, to 56 million. The New York Times -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The spike in online shopping during the year-end holidays has been much reported, discussed and analyzed. But most of the research on the phenomenon has come from retailers' estimates of sales, while the Odyssey survey is from the consumer perspective. Every six months, the San Francisco-based researcher interviews 2,500 randomly selected households by telephone, asking them about their use of personal computers and electronics gear. The most recent Odyssey study, conducted in January, points to a clear trend: more people are making purchases online, more often, and they are using advertisements they see on the World Wide Web to make decisions about what to buy. The growth of online shopping has clearly been fueled by the falling price of personal computers. Today, half of American households have personal computers, up from 42 percent a year ago, according to Odyssey. The percentage of all households on line has increased to 33 percent from 23 percent a year earlier. But online shopping is growing even faster than the increase in computer use and Internet access. Of households with Internet access, 47 percent made at least one purchase online in the latest six months, up from 30 percent a year ago, Odyssey reports. Of the households buying online, the average number of purchases is 3.7 over the last six months, compared with 1.7 purchases in the year-earlier period. "The appeal of electronic commerce, even in its current nascent state, keeps consumers coming back," said Nicholas Donatiello, president of Odyssey. It is difficult to say just how much of the rise in online shopping is a result of tireless promotion of electronic commerce by America Online; but that is certainly a big factor. Some 40 percent of all households with access to cyberspace get there through America Online -- 10 times the share of its nearest rivals, Microsoft's MSN and AT&T's Worldnet, Odyssey reports. Seeking to garner a larger proportion of its revenue from advertising and transactions, America Online has powerfully encouraged its subscribers to try online shopping. "What America Online does is what happens in this market, because it is so dominant," Donatiello said.