Survey: Thanksgiving e-shoppers gobble up goods

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By Scarlet Pruitt

(IDG) -- The holiday shopping season has gotten off to a strong start, with the number of people visiting e-commerce sites during the week of Thanksgiving jumping 43 percent over the same period last year, according to data released Thursday by Jupiter Media Metrix Inc.

The number of people visiting shopping sites from both home and work for the week ending November 25 rose to 50.2 million from 35.2 million last year, with click-and-mortar sites experiencing more growth than pure-play e-commerce sites, Jupiter said.

Ticketmaster.com experienced the greatest user growth Thanksgiving week, posting a 424 percent increase over the same period last year with 713,000 average daily unique visitors, while Ebates.com registered a 400 percent growth totaling 120,000 average daily unique visitors this year and Drugstore.com came in 319 percent higher with 373,000 average daily unique visitors compared to last year.

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However, the top three sites in terms of the average number of unique daily visitors were online auction site eBay.com, Amazon.com and Mypoints.com. EBay had 4 million unique daily visitors, a 57 percent increase from last year, while Amazon drew 49 percent more daily visitors, totaling 2.3 million. Meanwhile, MyPoints lured 1.8 million daily visitors to its site Thanksgiving week, a 31 percent increase from last year.

Jupiter ranked auctions, books and computers as the top three categories in terms of unique daily visitors, while the top three categories in terms of percentage increase compared to last year were games, health care and furniture.

Catalog sites are still struggling to find their niches, according to the researcher, with few catalog sites exceeding more than 100,000 unique visitors daily. Catalog sites gaining the most traffic during Thanksgiving week were EddieBauer.com, with an average 111,000 daily visitors, followed by Landsend.com with 84,000 and LLBean.com with 70,000.

Jupiter predicts that total 2001 online retail and travel sales will reach some $11.9 billion, an 11 percent increase over last year, as consumers choose to do more of their shopping on the Net.