Early returns on Black Friday sales on and offline look more positive than feared… but it looks like it may be a bargain hunters’ Christmas.
As we posted yesterday, Internet Retailer released the results of their Holiday Sales Retailer survey on November 11th. According the survey, retailers are putting on an optimistic game face with 81.1% believing that their holiday Internet sales will grow year over year. If early returns from Pricegrabber and ShopperTrak hold, their optimism may be vindicated.
The San Jose Merucury News reported that Pricegrabber.com was seeing double digit year-over-year traffic gains early in the day. This by itself may not have been indictive but coupled with year-over-year offline trends as reported by ShopperTrak t his is a hopeful note.
ShopperTrak reported today that retail sales increased 3.0 percent over 2007. The growth was down from 2007 which had seen more than 8% growth over 2006. Yet, any comp year-over-year growth this season is reason for some early Holiday cheer.
Now on to Cyber Monday!
I’m watching for the early indicators from Amazon. They made a huge Black Friday marketing pitch to their customer base and have agressive promotions this weekend and some targeted for Monday.
Let’s hope that ecommerce does outperform the rest of the economy as consumers look to stretch their dollar beyond the confines of Wal-mart… and that it somehow extends to at least modest comp sales growth for branded new goods full-priced retailers as well.
Comments? What do you think is going to happen this season? Let your Holiday 2008 predictions be known!
NTcreargyarcalk said,
January 30, 2009 @ 4:56 am