The top performers for time delivery were sporting goods, health and beauty, and food Horse hair suit interlining nonwoven fabric rolls for garment and drink.As noted in an early eBiz column, the season started with a promising lift over the Thanksgiving weekend, which is the traditional launch of Christmas gift buying. And the online cheer came at a time when offline retailers were fighting for their share of a downbeat seasonal market.The Silver Twinkle in Holiday 2001 by Rob SpiegelAfter a devastating year for dot coms, some good news has finally emerged." The top three traditional retailers during the holiday season were Columbia House, with 598,000 average daily unique visitors.

Toysrus with 515,000 and Barnesandnoble with 447,000. While the Internet as a whole experienced a 50 percent increase in sales, the traditional retailers saw their Web sales grow by 73 percent over 2000. "With a few exceptions such as Amazon. A year of downbeat new releases has concluded with a very promising up note, brining cheer to Net retailers. But unlike the year before, the good news continued all though the season.S. The Christmas season may actually have ushered in a break in the stormy clouds, and that could indicate some real sunshine.Both years came in with a dismal 12 percent late delivery. During most weeks the shoppers constituted more than 15 percent of Americans, and on the week of December a full 20 percent of the U. On any given week of November and December the number of shoppers exceeded 10 percent of the U. "We've been waiting for the inevitable dominance of traditional retailers over their pure-play counterparts, and it appears that 2001 may have been the year when it finally happened, said Ken Cassar, senior analyst at Jupiter Research.  

The gist is that U.As well as the good news, there were also some less exciting developments during the holiday season. Call it whatever cliché you like, the silver lining around the black cloud, or the twinkle in Santa's eye, but online retail sites have much to celebrate from 2001 holiday sales season. The volume of orders that did not arrive on time for Christmas did not improve over 2000. Not surprisingly, the traffic and sales peaked during the first two weeks of December, a week or two earlier than the peak for offline retailers.8 billion online, up 15 percent from the 2000 holiday season.The Jupiter Media Metrix Holiday 2001 E-commerce Series delivered some very encouraging news, showing that traffic at online sites was up 50 percent from a year earlier, and up 95 percent from 1999.com, the dominant retailers that sell merchandise directly from their sites tend to be affiliated with brick-and-mortar stores and catalogs.Overall, the 2001 holiday season was more than a silver lining around the dark cloud of the 2001 dot com disaster. population purchased goods over the Internet.According to Jupiter, the Net retailers that saw the greatest increase in sales also have a brick component.  

Online retailing is clearly here to stay, even if the big numbers are collecting on the balance sheets of the major offline retailers. In each of the weeks ended December  and December 14, online spenders exceeded.Encouraging statistics were released by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and NielsenNetRatings in their group report of online spending and traffic billion in purchases.As well as raw numbers of shoppers, the Internet also claimed a good percentage of American consumers.As for actual in-stock items, Net retailers actually did better than the year before, so there may be some merit to their complains about delivery companies.Many online retailers blamed late shipments on delivery services.