The New Mall of America - Industry Trend or Event

Industry Standard, The, Dec, 2000 by Jen Davis

As e-tail begins to catch up to its hype, here's our guide to the 50 most important online stores.

It's become an annual tradition, just like Peanuts reruns and fruitcakes: Every holiday season, as retail spending hits its peak, the pundits bravely predict that this is the year online shopping will finally hit the big time. Those predictions are slowly edging closer to the truth. Annual e-tail sales now top $33 billion, and a whopping 328 million online orders are expected to be placed in 2000. This must be the year, right? Probably not. The fact is, despite phenomenal growth, online sales still account for little more than 1 percent of total U.S. retail spending.

But while neither the rosy projections nor the less-than-rosy reality change, the e-tail landscape does. Some sites fall off the map, and new ones pop up. Which e-stores stand out this year? Here's our list of the 50 most important e-tail sites, the top five in each of 10 categories. To compile it, we looked at revenues, site traffic (using numbers from Media Metrix), customer satisfaction (as measured by Gomez Advisors and BizRate.com) and the opinions of The Industry Standard's e-commerce experts.

Half of these sites are online-only pure-plays such as Buy.com and eToys, while the rest include bricks-and-clicks firms such as Target and the Gap. Many of the bricks-and-clicks sites cluster in a few categories -- such as Apparel and General -- where their established brand names and proven distribution channels are an advantage. Amazon is the exception: It's the one pure-play that's grown so far beyond its original niche that it now joins retail giants like Wal-Mart and Sears in the General group.

Some of these companies could be out of business this time next year. Others will only get stronger. And when online retail finally does hit it really, really big, chances are it's those survivors that will make it happen.

METHODOLOGY

Revenues are for the entire company, not just the Web division.

Hits are defined as the number of unique visitors according to Media Metrix's July 2000 survey of 55.000 individuals throughout the U.S.

Gomez ratings are on a scale from 1 to 10, and are based on usability. depth of product content, customer confidence and relationship services. Gomez has industry-specific rules about which sites it rates: to be rated in its Apparel category, for example, a site must sell both men's and women's clothing, If a site has no Gomez rating, that doesn't necessarily imply poor customer satisfaction.