Online sales a bit better than last year

With so much talk of consumers scaling back this year, retailers have to be somewhat pleased -- or relieved -- by holiday sales figures to date, at least based on the numbers coming in from the online world.

After doing the math, ComScore, which tracks online spending, today reported that consumers spent nearly $16 billion during the first 36 days of the November – December 2009 holiday shopping season. That's 3 percent above the amount spent during the corresponding days last year.

In fact, for the week ending Dec. 6, consumer spending topped $4.6 billion – higher than the figures for any week in 2008 (though still below two individual weeks in 2007, which was long before the economy tanked).

ComScore noted that the week kicked off with a bang as shoppers emptied their wallets on Cyber Monday – after Thanksgiving weekend – spending $887 million, or 5 percent more than on the same day in 2008. By the end of the week, however, most of the momentum had died down.

"After a strong beginning to the week, we saw growth rates decelerate over the weekend to put this past week of holiday shopping in line with our 3 percent growth forecast for the season," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "We are anticipating heavy spending for the current week, making it an important determinant for how the holiday season as a whole will perform. Hopefully, we'll see a return to the growth rates we observed during the earlier part of this past week and that the weekend softness was just a temporary hiccup."

Facebook, user reviews influence buying decisions

Along with collecting sales data, comScore also surveys the nation's consumers about their shopping behavior. And in its most recent survey, conducted Dec. 4 to 7, 28 percent of respondents indicated that consumer-generated product reviews were the most common form of social media that had influenced their holiday purchases (13 percent of respondents said user reviews were a factor in what they bought), followed by an expert product review (11 percent). Seven percent of respondents indicated they have followed a fan page on Facebook to take advantage of special offers and deals, while 6 percent said they have been influenced by a friend's Facebook status update referring to a particular product. Five percent of respondents indicated they had followed a company on Twitter to take advantage of special offers and deals, while 3 percent said that a friend's "tweet" about a product influenced their purchase behavior. We discussed the issue of product reviews in a post yesterday.