Mercent Announces Holiday 2008 Retail Results: Same Seller Sales Increase 29.6% YOY

Comparison Shopping Engines, Amazon.com, and eBay Shine

As a follow up to our Cyber Monday post, today Mercent released aggregate year-over-year customer online sales growth numbers for December 2008. Interesting to note how closely performance on Black Friday and Cyber-Monday predicted future results for the season. In December, our clients’ aggregate online sales generated by Mercent were up 29.6% YOY.

Conclusions

The most obvious conclusion to draw from our data is that consumers aggressively leveraged comparison shopping sites like Google Product Search, NexTag, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber.com and the third-party seller programs at Amazon.com and eBay (particularly fixed-price listings) to their advantage this holiday. While bargains are always found immediately following Thanksgiving and Christmas, it seems the abundance of discount pricing, coupon offers, free shipping and other promotions throughout the entire month of December encouraged shoppers to utilize these sites like never before.

While overall online sales were down anywhere from 1% to 7% in December 2008 (depending on cited source), hurt by the economy and a short post-Thanksgiving shopping season, aggressive retail advertisers have access to a high-growth, high-intent channel for acquiring new customers and revenues.

Methodology

The methodology for this comparison matches our Cyber-Monday study. This performance data reflects retail transactions driven through The Mercent Shopping Network. For the purposes of this report, to ensure “same seller” continuity and to eliminate artifact associated with new customer sales ramp, we excluded all retailers that launched on the Mercent Retail platform after Q3 2007. We did allow for expanded distribution/participation in the Mercent Shopping Network, as this is effectively an increase in advertising reach and budget – available to any online retailer and expected of high-growth companies.

Unlike the Cyber-Monday study, we ran the December year-over-year comparison two ways to help eliminate artifact associated with weekday sales cycles. On the graph below, the red line shows daily sales growth relative to the same date (day of the month) in 2007. Weekly spikes are inherent in the daily sales growth line (Red) before adjustment for weekday cyclicality – Mondays, for instance, are typically the biggest sales day of the week. These spikes disappear when the data is shifted so weekdays are aligned year-over-year (Blue). Of course this adjustment skews sales growth immediately prior to and following Christmas as the holiday is no longer aligned – creating a bigger spike and drop around the 25th. We’ve elected to report on the date-aligned (rather than weekday-aligned) figures as they present a more moderate result overall for the month. For complete press coverage of these results, see our In the News page at Mercent.com.

Here’s to recovery and growth in 2009!

Eric Best
CEO, Mercent

Tagged: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Comparison Shopping Engine, Mercent Shopping Network, Online Holiday, Holiday Online

Comments

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Way to go, Eric! Granny

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Increased in promotional channels results in quick sales with intersive profit margins , this has been seen in year 2008 , how the revenues jumped from 1 % to 8 % .

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Thanks for your post. I must say it was so informative that I would include some of the facts into my research paper of the online sales. The progress never stops. I think our grandparents would never dream of doing the shopping by means of two clic

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