Usually, nobody beats Santa Claus’ famed night-before-Christmas deliveries. But John Michener did.
Last year, the 42-year-old Minneapolis engineer got up Christmas morning, slogged off in his rumpled sweats to his laptop, hit a few keys and sent his parents in North Carolina an electronic gift card from L.L. Bean.
“Yeah, I kinda put it off a little bit,” he admitted sheepishly.
Michener obviously pushed the deadline, but analysts who have been watching the evolution of Internet retailing say holiday shoppers are getting so accustomed to the convenience of shopping online that more of them are shopping closer to Christmas. They’re depending upon electronic retailers to sweat the details and get their gifts delivered in time to be opened under the tree.
Although some retailers are confident enough to offer online ordering even on Dec. 23–and many offer electronic gift cards to buy Christmas day–a few analysts worry about the ghosts of Christmases past: years in which some e-tailers botched the job and online retailing got a black eye.
So will it be ho-ho-ho or oh-no-no this season?
The growth of online shopping is undisputed, even if the calculations are uneven. Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass., technology research and consulting firm, predicts that online holiday sales will rise 42 percent to $12.2 billion. Rival Jupiter Research in New York City forecasts consumers will spend $16.8 billion during the holiday season, up 21 percent.
Malls can blame themselves for the business they’re losing, said Donna Hoffman, co-director of the Vanderbilt University Sloan Center for Internet Retailing.
“Online shoppers have grown accustomed to being able to compare features of similar products, whereas many mall clerks don’t know any more about the products in their stores than you do,” Hoffman said.
Jupiter analyst Patti Freeman Evans has noticed that consumers have been buying holiday gifts online later every year.
PriceGrabber.com, a comparison-shopping site, saw sales referrals climb in the week before Christmas last year versus a decline during the 2001 shopping season, she said. The week before Christmas is crunch time, and more online shoppers–42 percent–than overall holiday shoppers–38 percent–plan to complete shopping during the last week, according to the American Express Retail Index on holiday shopping.
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Edited by Lara Weber (lweber@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
