Now that the shopping craze of Black Friday has passed, retailers are talking about Cyber Monday, when people shop online today for great holiday deals.
“Cyber Monday is a big day for us,” although not the biggest day, which usually falls during the first week in December, said Sheliah Gilliland, spokeswoman for eToys.com, which carries more than 24,000 products. People shop at work, she said, and our “sales spike during the lunch hour,” she said.
Seventy-four percent of Internet users nationwide will do some shopping online, and about 26 percent will spend about half of their holiday budget in online purchases, according to an AOL Shopping/Zogby Interactive poll.
A November Consumer Reports study found that 42 percent of all adults will do some of their holiday shopping online, up from 40 percent last year.
In the D.C. area, 76 percent of Internet users will shop online, with roughly one-quarter of them spending most of their holiday money in online purchases, AOL/Zogby researchers found. Twenty-eight percent of metro-area online shoppers will buy children’s toys, while more than twice that number, 66 percent, intend to purchase books, music and movies.
The AOL/Zogby poll was conducted Nov. 2-12 in the nation’s top 20 direct-market areas. Sample sizes ranged from 399 to 1,552, and margins of error from plus or minus 2.5 to 5 percentage points.
The Greater D.C. region ranks seventh for online shopping.
Fritz Wenzel of Zogby International would have expected Washington to rank even higher, due to the traffic around the suburbs. But it’s also a “transient city,” he said, and many people might be traveling elsewhere for the holidays and perhaps shopping elsewhere.
E-commerce overall is growing about 20 percent each year, said Michael Niemira, vice presidentand chief economist for the International Council of Shopping Centers. That growth, however, is dependent in part on catalogs.
“People will use a catalog as a marketing tool to drive people to their Internet site, where the actual transaction takes place,” Niemira said.
When you look at the e-commerce and mail order sectors combined, said Niemira, the growth is only about 10 percent — so much of the online growth is just coming from mail orders and “doesn’t represent a real growth.”
Consumers ranked the benefits of shopping online in this order, according to Consumer Reports: convenience (48 percent), no crowds (17 percent), better selection (12 percent) and better prices (11 percent).
The Consumer Reports survey polled 1,009 people in the beginning of November and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.
Top 10 Cities
Ranking/City/Percent Shopping Online
1. Philadelphia 79.3
2. Boston 78.6
3. Orlando 78.0
4. Seattle 78.0
5. Denver 77.6
6. Atlanta 76.9
7. Washington 75.7
8. Houston 75.4
9. San Francisco 75.1
10. Detroit 75.0
