California Apparel News

Coming off of a better-than-expected Black Friday, with retail sales up 7 percent from last year for bricks-and-mortar stores, the Web’s Cyber Monday—the day after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the unofficial start to the online shopping season—saw a bigger bump for online retailers.

E-tailers raked in $846 million in online spending, an increase of 15 percent over last year, according to Reston, Va.–based Internet market research firm comScore Inc. The four-day period from Black Friday through Cyber Monday saw e-commerce sales up 13 percent. However, overall online spending from Nov. 1 to Dec. 1 was $12.03 billion—a 2 percent decline from last year.

Cyber Monday’s $846 million also marks the second-highest online spending day, according to comScore’s tracking.

Monday sales were encouraging for online retailers and historically may bode well for the rest of the holiday season. Cyber Monday is not the heaviest online shopping day of the year, said Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst for comScore. The biggest spending day typically occurs around mid-December. Several analysts expect online sales to peak on Dec. 15—allowing consumers’ orders to arrive in time for the Christmas holiday.

However, if the slowdown in sales following the days after Black Friday for bricks-and-mortar stores is any indicator, the following weeks may be challenging for e-tailers.

Nachi Lolla, research director of commerce for Nielsen Online, a division of Nielsen Co., said that while the Cyber Monday returns were positive, he was hesitant to indicate that assured e-tail sales growth was on the horizon until more data on the holiday season come in.

“The consumers may have spent a majority of their shopping dollars right away or are waiting and seeing for what other promotions retailers have for them,” Lolla said. “It remains unclear, and we are in a different economy this year.”

According to Nielsen Online, traffic to Web sites was up 10 percent on Monday, with beauty, toys and video games, and apparel experiencing the majority of consumer visits. Apparel was the third-highest-ranked product category, with an increase of 58 percent in traffic over the previous week.

Despite analysts’ uncertainty for the season, some e-tailers are remaining confident. “Our inbound customer orders for Cyber Monday increased 70 percent over last year,” said Katherine Liem, vice president of operations and merchandising for San Francisco–based fashion site Tobi (www.tobi.com). “Customers have been reacting positively to the current, highly promotional environment that retailers have created, so we project to begin 2009 with clean inventory levels.”

E-commerce shoppers took advantage of the sales and promotions that started well before Cyber Monday, which this year fell on Dec. 1, later than in previous years. “Considering what all has been said, we did pretty good,” said Carol McCracken, co-owner of Costa Mesa, Calif.–based contemporary apparel site Pink Mascara (www.pinkmascara.com). “As of 5 p.m., we were up about 25 percent. We did have a much more aggressive Cyber Monday promotion this year, so for sales, we’re up, and for net, we’re close to the same as last year.”

The surge in spending may have come as a relief to some e-tailers, but it fell short from last year’s increase of 19 percent, which reflects the ongoing impact of an unstable economy and waning consumer confidence. Cyber Monday was also shadowed by the announcement from the Cambridge, Mass.–based National Bureau of Economic Research that the U.S. economy is officially in a recession and has been since December 2007.

There were also momentary glitches for Monday shoppers. There were technical problems reported on a few Web sites, according to Gomez Inc., a firm that monitors Web site performance. Consumers reported receiving error messages on Dell’s computer and electronics site (www.dell.com), while intimate-apparel retailer Victoria’s Secret (www.victoriassecret.com) had problems completing transactions in its site’s shopping carts.