December a.k.a. The Money Maker

Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, although merchants have launched their special offers and promotions since Thanksgiving. Because of that, the online sellers expected huge sales and profits especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two days that became famous as the busiest shopping moments of the year. However, the online shopping became a very popular activity among lots of Internet consumers, so the highest rate of sales was recorded last week, comScore announced yesterday. The November 1 - December 7 period brought no less than $18.01 billions in online spendings, according to figures published by the same company. This means an 18 percent increase compared to the last year, when buyers spent 'only' $15.24 billions.

"December got off to a strong start, as we saw spending growth accelerate to 20 percent for the week and the first ever $800 million online spending day on record," said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. "It was a terrific kick-start to December, but we expect the upcoming week to be the heaviest online spending week of the holiday season as the procrastinators and late-season deal-seekers come out in earnest".

Just to see the difference between the mentioned period, I must say that Black Friday brought spendings of $0.53 billion (compared with $0.43 billion in 2006), whereas Cyber Monday came with $0.73 billion. This represents a 21 percent increase, from the $0.61 billion recorded in 2006.

Nintendo Wii game consoles and Apple iPods represent the most popular products among shoppers, as no less than 30,455,000 and 24,777,000 searches related to these gadgets were recorded by the search engines.

"Gaming consoles and accessories represent the strongest growing product category this holiday season, with sales up more than 130 percent versus year ago. The Nintendo Wii is attracting particularly strong interest, as evidenced by the intense search activity occurring around the product", the comScore official added.