Holidays are good for online sales

MMR, July 21, 2008

NEW YORK -- Online sales during the 2007 holiday season reached $39 billion in the United States, a 20% increase over the preceding year, according to JupiterResearch, which predicts further gains this year.

To get their share of that business, though, retailers will need to improve their sites to accommodate heavy online traffic. A new report by JupiterResearch, titled "Holiday 2007 Postmortem--Comparing Online and Offline Sales Growth," says retailers must be prepared for those

days when the highest share of Web traffic goes to retail sites: Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, the Saturday after Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Multichannel retailers also should take steps to promote off-line store experiences, store locations, in-store inventory and such cross-channel service offerings as in-store pickup and returns.