Listen To Their Wallet, Not Their Mouth!

While most Americans will tell you that the economy stinks, what they are saying with their wallets is quite another story. If you listen to the talk, you might become discouraged about your chances of success as an Internet entrepreneur.

Here is an article about sales this Christmas season that is very important for you as an online retailer. I have bolded and changed the color on some crucial text, but have put it here verbatim. Check it out, especially the parts that pertain to you.



US Christmas shopping season off to strong start
11-26-2006, 22h41 WASHINGTON (AFP)

They looked, they counted, and they liked the numbers. Less than 48 hours after department stores swung their doors wide open in the pre-dawn chill to let in first Christmas shoppers, the main national retail tracker reported the US holiday shopping season was off to a "relatively strong start."

Sales on Black Friday, as the day following the Thanksgiving holiday is widely known, jumped a healthy 6.0 percent compared to a year ago to reach an estimated 8.96 billion dollars, ShopperTrak RCT Corporation said in its retail performance estimate released Saturday. Christmas sales have been traditionally seen as a reliable barometer of consumer confidence and the overall performance of the US economy. Their strength this year may have come as a surprise as a Gallup poll taken earlier this month found that only 40 percent of Americans believed the state of the nation's economy was either "excellent" or "good," while 59 percent described it as "fair" or "poor."

But the pocketbook vote yielded a different result.

"Although we anticipated a solid consumer turnout for Black Friday, this data shows an even larger increase than expected as consumers proved they were willing to spend," noted Bill Martin, co-founder of ShopperTrak. He cautioned that Black Friday was not the greatest bellwether for the season's performance and retailers needed to remain cautious. "But undoubtedly this type of a season opening is a nice shot in the arm for the industry," Martin stressed.

Scenes of expectation and excitement, sometimes bordering on chaos, mirrored each other from shopping mall to shopping mall -- from New York to Chicago to Seattle. After a traditional brief pause for Thanksgiving Day on Thursday, department stores began opening their doors as early as 5:00 am on Friday, luring early comers with promises of their most juicy bargains. But lines began forming even earlier, with hours of waiting culminating in a frenzied rush toward coveted merchandise the moment attendants unlocked the doors.

ShopperTrak said Friday's "impressive consumer outpouring" should have retailers feeling cautiously optimistic for the 2006 Christmas season when retailers usually make the bulk of their profits. The success, the company concluded, had a lot to do with extended retail discounts and a recent decline in gas and other energy prices that may have left consumers with more disposable income to spend.

J.C. Penney, the nation's largest catalogue merchant and owner of one of the leading department store chains, said in a statement that traffic in its outlets throughout the nation was "brisk," with home entertainment products, jewelry, and children's apparel leading the list of the most popular items. However, at Wal-Mart, the largest US retailer, results were disappointing. The Bentonville, Arkansas-based giant reported that its sales for a four-week period starting October 28 and including Black Friday dropped 0.1 percent. No reason for the loss was given.

The most breathtaking growth, however, was reported in the burgeoning sector of Internet sales, which took off just a few years ago.

Retail Decisions, a Hazlet, New Jersey-based company that specializes in online fraud prevention, said Saturday that Internet trade volumes went up a whopping 109 percent on Black Friday compared to a year ago.

"Through our global fraud prevention and payment processing platforms, we record and analyze a significant percentage of online payment transactions globally," said Carl Clump, the Retail Decisions chief executive officer.

"There has certainly been a significant surge on Black Friday as retailers promote their online shopping channels as vigorously as their brick and mortar stores," he pointed out.