eBay's Shopping.com Reports on Holiday Season Traffic

During the holiday shopping season, Shopping.com, the leading online comparison shopping site, experienced record-breaking traffic to its merchants. This season, the site also experienced the busiest day in company history on Monday, December 11, with 46 percent growth in traffic to merchants year-over-year. Seasonal increases in traffic began on November 13 and are expected - with stores offering post-holiday sales, as well as shoppers redeeming gift cards - to remain strong throughout January. In fact, though traffic dropped to normal off-season levels from December 22-25, traffic increased to higher than normal levels from December 26-28 during post-holiday shopping. Merchant traffic for the post-holiday period saw a 46 increase year-over-year, compared to the same period in 2005.

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The gift of shopping

Shop for gifts or give a gift of shopping with Shopping Chauffeur. You or your lucky gift recipient will tool Uptown and downtown, Mockingbird Station to Highland Park Village in a Mercedes-Benz or chauffeured limo with a stylist who will help you spend your money at boutiques, galleries, outlet malls and antiques stores. You'll get personal service, advice, private dressing rooms, champagne and hors d'oeuvres and lunch as you go. Before setting out, you'll have met with your stylist so she can get a sense of your style and learn what you seek, for yourself or others. .

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Online Retail: Are We Buying or Shopping?

Jim Sterne and I had our almost monthly lunch last week and he commented that a major problem with on-line retailing is that it is mostly about buying rather than shopping. Interesting ... In the real world when you go out to buy a gift you either know what you want and buy it or you browse, looking for that particular gift that will fit the occasion and the person (unlike a certain group of people I know who bought their grandmother an electric chainsaw for her birthday and demoed it by slicing her kitchens chairs in half ... that is, of course, another story). On-line things are similar when you know what you want. You find a supplier, find the gift you had in mind, add it to your cart, and virtually head for the checkout. It is when you don't know what you want that things aren't so smooth.

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