Starting tomorrow I will be in Virginia for the rest of the weekend, posting will be slow until Monday. Before I leave, however, lets take a look at some online shopping trends through the lens of some recent surveys.

Data

Netconcepts, a strategy platform for online retailers found recently that organic search results are on the rise for e-tailers. When they looked at the organic search traffic of users of their “GravityStream” service they found that from November 19th to November 26th (Cyber Monday) organic web traffic increased by 10% over last years numbers for the same time period.

Add to that another study done by ForeSee that included 57,000 visitors to about 40 retail sites. This one states that likelihood to purchase online is up by about 2.2% from this time last year.

If you take a look at the grossly inaccurate Alexa data for the periods that these surveys cover you will see that during the week before and after Cyber Monday there was a modest bump in traffic for merchants like Amazon and Best Buy. After that, the traffic flagged back to it’s pre-Monday levels.

Shopping Trends

Can we take anything away from this?

In all likelihood online shopping this season will see a small increase over the last. I think the real value will come not so much from more people going to online retailers but from more people being willing to purchase from them. From this point last year, the overall trust in and satisfaction with the internet shopping experience has jumped.

More than organic web traffic, this is more likely the result of shoppers becoming more sophisticated and more able to recognize that online often comes with deals that they would be unable to find anywhere else.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Will we see a record setting year in online shopping? Maybe. But, I think much more important than that is that we are starting to see the type of patterns that will eventually lead to blurring of the lines between e-tail and more traditional outlets.

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