Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

Those of us on the East Coast were buried this past weekend in a monumental December snowstorm leading some to fear that holiday sales would be interrupted. According to NPD’s Consumer Tracking Service, the regions impacted by the snow, New England and the Mid-Atlantic, accounted for 18 percent of sales for the first 10 months of the year. While this is a substantial amount of volume it’s not likely that a one or two day pause in holiday shopping will cause measurable impact on the final holiday sales volume, even when those two days are two of the busiest days holiday shopping days, the Saturday and Sunday before Christmas.

Read more »

Is ecommerce the light at the end of the tunnel?

NPD’s newly released weekly ecommerce data for the first few weeks of the holiday shows, as it has in our monthly tracking all year, a considerable divergence in trends between brick and mortar retailing and online sales. In the weekly data we saw strong results, as expected, for ecommerce during the Cyber Monday week, but in addition we saw very strong growth -stronger than in Cyber Monday week - for ecommerce during Black Friday week. Sales growth in general was much stronger online than in stores for both weeks.

So, is ecommerce the light at the end of the tunnel for consumer technology retailing or is it a freight train, ready to crush physical retailing like Wile E Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons? It is fascinating that in the 10 years or so since Internet retailing burst into our consciousness that we are still asking this question.

Read more »