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Online Retail Sales Will See Steady Growth, Reaching $230 Billion in 2008
While offline retail sales continue to struggle, online retail will grow at a steady 19 percent year-over-year growth rate, from $95.7 billion in 2003 to $229.9 billion in 2008, according to a new report from Forrester Research. Most significant, online retail sales will account for 10 percent of total US retail sales by 2008. Forrester's "US eCommerce Overview: 2003 To 2008" finds that a growing online consumer base, increases in new product categories, and efforts by online retailers to optimize online shopping experiences will spark significant growth over the next five years.
Online retailers are investing more heavily in site design and usability testing in an effort to create optimal shopping experiences for their customers. Today, 84% of the top 92 ecommerce sites offer zoom options for viewing products online, and retailers like Sears and Office Depot offer Spanish-language sites to better serve their Hispanic shoppers. As a result of site improvements, online conversion rates have increased.
http://www.forrester.com
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Consumers Shopping Internet for Back to School & Summer Clearance
Nielsen//NetRatings reports that surfers are turning to the Web to fulfill their back to school shopping needs, with some online retailers experiencing triple-digit growth during the week ending August 3. As the fastest growing online retailer for the week, traffic to Smartbargains.com skyrocketed 209 percent to more than one million unique visitors, as compared to 337,000 the previous week. Apparel retailer Old Navy jumped 109 percent with 614,000 unique visitors, while multi-category retailer Buy.com jumped 83 percent with 1.2 million unique visitors, partly driven by strong growth to Buy.com’s “Back to School Superstore”. Traffic to ABC Distributing Inc. jumped 83 percent to 346,000 unique visitors. Rounding out the top five fastest growing sites, shopping aggregator iWon Shopping jumped 61 percent to 290,000 unique visitors.
Nielsen//NetRatings is the global standard for Internet audience measurement and analysis and is the industry’s premier source for online advertising intelligence with its NetView, AdRelevance, @Plan and WebRF services.
http://www.nielsen-netratings.com
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Zoovy and GoToast Integrate with DealTime Shopping Search Engine
It was a good couple weeks for Dealtime. Both Zoovy, a provider of online auction management and e-Commerce solutions, and GoToast, a global provider of pay-per-click search engine optimization and online marketing management tools, completed their integration with DealTime, a leading shopping search engine and consumer reviews and ratings platform. The integration allows Zoovy's and GoToast's clients to easily launch, measure and optimize their customer acquisition campaigns on DealTime.
http://www.zoovy.com
http://www.gotoast.com
http://www.dealtime.com
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