Daily Research News Online no. 2810 - More Online Holiday Spending, and Earlier

More Online Holiday Spending, and Earlier

December 17 2003

Consumers in the US began their holiday shopping earlier this year, according to the eSpending report produced by Goldman Sachs & Co., Harris Interactive(r), and Nielsen//NetRatings. Last month's spend of $8.5bn, excluding travel, is up 55% on November 2002.

Fifty-one percent of respondents say that they started their online holiday shopping during November, jumping from 43% last year. Product categories for video/DVD, books, music and toys/video games (hardware and software) were very popular. Online shoppers spent $758m on videos and DVDs in November, a 133% increase over last year (see table). Books stayed ahead of this figure but only just - the total of $761m is 61% up on last year. $402m was spent on the music category, a rise of 57% year on year, and toys and video games were up 32%.

Clothing / apparel remains the leading category with $1.6bn spent, up roughly one third on last year. The table shows the % of all respondents who purchased in each category.

Category	% Purchasing in Category
Books	5.3%
Apparel/Clothing	5.2%
Video/DVD	4.5%
Toys/Video games (hardware and software)	3.8%
Music	3.4%

Source: Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings eSpending Report, December 2003
Number of respondents = 4,765 online users

According to Lori Iventosch-James, director of e-commerce research at Harris Interactive, 'The increase in spending suggests that more consumers are now shopping online - and consumers appear to be spending more online as well'.

Figures for the week of 22-28 November show that search engines and shopping portals are fairly widely used, although many online shoppers already know which sites they want to buy from, with 51% of online consumers going directly to a retail Web site by typing in the URL. Thirty-seven percent of online shoppers used Google to search for online retailers, followed by eBay, used by 27%, and Yahoo! Search by 25%. 21% used bookmarks.

The eSpending Report is based on a weekly national survey of between 800 and 1,700 online shoppers randomly chosen from Harris Interactive's online panel of survey respondents, covering spending by market segment, consumer attitudes and motivations. The November summary data is based on more than 4,700 responses. For the search engine / portal data, 1,724 online users were asked the question 'Which of the following search engines or shopping portals did you use to find online stores over the past week?'

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.