Online Holiday Spending Tops $10B.

Online buying during the Holiday season topped $10 billion in 2000, a Goldman Sachs/ PC Data study disclosed.

Consumer online buying for the last week of December (Dec. 25-31) was $878 million compared with $542 million in 1999. The total Holiday spending reached $10.7 billion for 2000, which was up over 100 percent from $5.2 billion in 1999.

“Despite the downswing in the economy in recent weeks, online spending during the Holiday met most expectations,” said Cameron Meierhoefer, Internet analyst for PC Data. “Thanks to strong and early web spending this season in areas such as apparel and an impressive post-Christmas kick, overall spending topped $10 billion.”

“Even though sales recovered from an earlier slowdown, the results were not evenly distributed across categories or companies,” said Anthony Noto, Goldman Sachs Internet analyst. “Categories such as consumer electronics grew at 118 percent and books/music/video grew at 68 percent, while toys were not as strong online this year with only 37 percent year-over-year growth.”

The study demonstrated that post-Christmas shoppers appeared less “seasonal” in their online buying, and boosted spending numbers in computer hardware, apparel, home and garden and game software categories over the previous week. Computer hardware sales increased from $116 million to $232 million over the week, apparel from $98 million to $121 million, home and garden from $10 million to $22 million and game software from $19 million to $21 million.

Customer satisfaction was strong, with over 80 percent of online consumers reporting they would be likely or extremely to shop online again, and approximately 58 percent of consumers stating that the online shopping experience was better than last year during the Holidays.

Online Consumer Spending by Category
Week Ending Dec. 31, 2000

Category Spending (in thousands)
% Gift Spending

Apparel
$ 121,128
49.2%

Books
$ 40,576
39.7%

Computer Software
$ 32,479
17.4%

Computer Hardware
$ 232,947
34.2%

Game hardware
$ 17,024
66.8%

Game software
$ 21,010
33.2%

Toys/Children
$ 48,628
70.9%

Greeting cards
$ 6,866
54.9%

Event tickets
$ 7,850
29.3%

Electronics
$ 46,516
55.8%

Food/Grocery
$ 14,865
20.0%

Home N Garden
$ 22,250
33.7%

Flowers
$ 5,692
83.6%

HBA
$ 8,151
9.6%

Personal Accessories
$ 21,226
32.5%

Music
$ 14,893
42.2%

Pet supplies
$ 28,834
11.9%

Sporting goods
$ 17,240
39.2%

Travel
$ 81,794
12.5%

Video/DVD
$ 27,542
24.7%

Other
$ 61,211
25.0%

Total
$ 878,721

For more information at http://www.pcdataonline.com .