WEB WONDERS
Barry Diller and Wal-Mart shared honors yesterday for scoring record levels of online shopping in this year’s holiday sales kickoff.
Big markdowns and even free shipping on many items at scores of retailers helped draw more consumers online than ever during the three-day shopping binge, including what marketers dub Cyber Monday.
Analysts tracking online sales for the benchmark weekend reported double-digit sales gains, with Thanksgiving Day the busiest.
Purchases online jumped 29 percent on Thanksgiving, and climbed 22 percent on Black Friday, but yesterday’s results were expected to surpass both days when the final tally is completed later this week, said comScore.
Diller’s online shopping empire, InterActiveCorp, which includes the HSN shopping channel and TicketMaster, was christened by Nielsen Online as the top retail destination on Black Friday, with 5.3 million unique visitors, followed by Amazon.com and WalMart.com, with 5.1 million and 3.6 million, respectively.
Not all sites had a good day, though. Yahoo!’s payment processing system crashed for more than four hours yesterday, wrecking an undetermined number of customer transactions, said angry merchants. Yahoo! was unable to immediately determine the cause of the outages.
Meanwhile, a separate report by Hitwise, which tracks online action, said WalMart.com was the most visited retail Web site on Thanksgiving Day for the third consecutive year. BestBuy and Circuit City followed in second and third place, respectively.
Still, the number of shoppers crowding retail locations was seven times the size of the online shoppers, or about 147 million shoppers in stores compared to about 20 million online, said Nielsen.
The National Retail Federation said its in-store traffic was 4.8 percent greater than the prior year, while online action overall was expected to exceed a 20 percent gain.
Walmart.com chief Raul Vazquez said Black Friday sales climbed more than 60 percent from last year.
Combined sales for the two days after Thanksgiving increased 7.2 percent to $16.4 billion from a year earlier, said the National Retail Federation. It said customers spent an average of $347.44 in stores, down 3.5 percent from $360.15 last year.