U.S. buyers shopped aggressively online on Monday and Tuesday of this week,
spending significantly more than they did on the comparable days last year,
according to comScore.

Online retail spending hit US$700 million on Monday, up 33 percent from last
year, and $670 million on Tuesday, up 25 percent, the Web-monitoring company
said Thursday.

During the first 48 days of the holiday shopping season -- Nov. 1 to Dec. 18
-- U.S. shoppers have spent almost $25 billion in online retail purchases, up
19 percent from the same period last year, according to comScore.

As Christmas day approaches, the intensity of online shopping will ease up,
although late-shipping deals, in-store pickup options and price reductions should
keep growth rates strong in the remainder of the holiday season, comScore said.

The company expects online spending during the holidays to reach $29.5 billion,
which would represent a 20 percent increase over the 2006 season.

Meanwhile, Nielsen Online said Wednesday that a majority of online shoppers
it surveyed reported being either "very satisfied" or "somewhat
satisfied" with the customer support they received from online shopping
Web sites.

Nielsen Online's survey found that of the 46 percent of respondents who had
posted or planned to post reviews about their online shopping experience, 88
percent said those reviews were, or would be, positive.

Netflix topped the survey's customer satisfaction list, having been rated "very
satisfied" by 90.3 percent of respondents, and was followed by comparison-shopping
site NexTag.com (87 percent), giant e-tailer Amazon.com (86.6 percent), Yahoo
Shopping (84.3 percent) and Kohls.com (84.1 percent). Rounding out the top 10
were Barnesandnoble.com, HomeDepot.com, Circuitcity.com, eBay.com and JCPenney.com.

On the other end of the spectrum, sites that in recent days have been flagged
for buckling under the strong holiday-season traffic include Mastercard.com
and Macys.com.

Macys.com's home page faced slowdowns throughout Tuesday, taking, at its worst,
about 38 seconds to load, compared with the usual 2 seconds, according to Web
site uptime and availability tracker Gomez.

Apparently, while experiencing availability problems, Macys.com has been serving
up a page telling shoppers that the site is crowded and that they have to wait
until traffic decreases in order to be let in. An apparent screenshot
of this page was posted by The Consumerist blog on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Mastercard.com has racked up downtime of almost five hours between
Nov. 9 and Dec. 20, equivalent to uptime of 99.5 percent for that period, according
to Pingdom, which also tracks Web site performance. As such, Mastercard.com
has performed significantly worse than sites from competing credit-card companies
like Discover, Visa, Diners Club and American Express, all of which have had
uptime above 99.9 percent during this period, Pingdom said Thursday.

Neither Macy's nor MasterCard immediately responded to requests for comment.

IDG News Service

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine