E-commerce Continues to Set Records, Advantage to Amazon.com

Holiday e-commerce sales continue to set records. Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), which is the leader in e-commerce sales by far as a single company, is likely to be among the major beneficiaries of the trend.

Online research firm Comscore reported that:

The most recent week saw three individual days eclipse $1 billion in spending, led by Cyber Monday, which became the heaviest online spending day on record at $1.25 billion. Tuesday, November 29 reached $1.12 billion, while Wednesday, November 30 reached $1.03 billion. These three billion dollar spending days currently rank as three of the four heaviest online spending days in history (with Cyber Monday 2010 being the other).

The entire week saw online sales of $6 billion. Holiday season e-commerce spending, which began on November 1 by Comscore’s measures, is up 15% to $18.7 billion through the end of the Cyber Monday week.

The figures from Comscore do not tell who the retail winners or losers are. The losers are likely to include many bricks-and-mortar stores, particularly small ones without a major presence on the web. The National Retail Federation reported that sales were higher by only 6.6% through the Thanksgiving weekend. That means the move to e-commerce continues its five-year run.

The retailers with frequently visited websites are the most likely to be doing well. This includes Walmart.com (NYSE: WMT) and Target.com (NASDAQ: TGT). Walmart’s online sales are only about 4% of its total revenue, but with its same-store activity in the U.S. nearly flat, its internet revenue probably has become essential to whatever growth it can post.

Amazon.com has more online visitors, by far, than Walmart and Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) combined. It also has what is probably the hottest consumer electronics product of the season — the new Kindle Fire tablet PC. This should be a magnet for the Amazon.com website. Many people who visit the site likely will use it to buy holiday gifts beyond the Kindle. Amazon.com is as close to a one-stop shop as any retail business in America.

E-commerce figures are better than most analysts expected. As the largest company in the industry, Amazon will benefit more than any other from the improvement.

Douglas A. McIntyre