14 DAY TRIAL // Every holiday should bring happiness and peace in the hearts of those celebrating it; and a lot of money in the olden bags and modern bank accounts of the store owners, who commercialize merchandise that might become a gift for loved ones. As nowadays everything may be considered a gift, their pockets are pretty much filled with dough and their hearts are truly filled with the joy of the Holidays.
This year was not unlike others, in a continuing ascending trend of online shopping. And why wouldn't it be? The society values much more the staying indoors and the online persona than the actual person out and about.
Doug Tsuroka, of the Investor's Business Daily, quotes sources from MasterCard's Advisor's SpendingPulse, on Thursday, that said that U.S. online retail sales from November 23rd to December 24th rose 22.4 percent. Others say that the rise is closer to 30 percent, but as the figures are pretty close (in the "not a huge 25 percent difference between them" meaning of the word), it's basically the same thing.
eMarketer has predicted an 18.5 percent rise in online sales in November and December, and another similar site, comScore, measured a 19 percent jump in the sales figures from November 1st to December 17th, as opposed to the same period of last year.
The top selling products were toys for Christmas (I think that's because there are a lot more children believing in Santa than adults) as Amazon.com said, and it even gave a list of the items with the highest numbers of items sold: "top sellers included Jakks Pacific's EyeClops Bionic Eye, the IlluStory Make Your Own Story Kit by Creations By You and Spinmaster's Air Hogs Havoc Heli. Top sellers in video included Nintendo's Wii player, and the 'Super Mario Galaxy' and 'Call of Duty 4' games. In DVD movies, top sellers included 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix', 'Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series' and 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End'."
However, customer satisfaction dropped by about 1 percent, as ForeSee Results show, which measured and compared it to that of the previous year, with 73 opposed to 74. That goes to say that many e-tailers lost a chance to boost customer loyalty this holiday. Bummer!