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Retail

Brutal Year For E-Commerce, Online Holiday Sales Up Only 3.5%

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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There had been a great deal of hope among online retailers that 2009 would be a substantial improvement over 2008, a year in which e-commerce revenue growth was the worst it has been since measurements began.

Online websites should be taking more market share from bricks-and-mortar stores as more people become comfortable with shopping online. Large snow storms that kept shoppers off the roads should also have bumped e-commerce sales. But, it did not work out that way. comScore, the leading researcher of online commercial activity, reports that internet retail was up only 5% this holiday season to $27.1 billion. Once the figures are adjusted for the number of shopping days last year and this, the improvement was only 3.5%.

Sales of consumer electronics rose 20% from November 1 to December 24, which means that the sales of almost every other category of goods and services dropped during the period.

Happy New Year.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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