27
2005
Hitwise Retail 100 Index Maps Closely to Holiday Spending
Today MasterCard Advisors’ Spending Pulse service announced that year-over-year holiday spending increased 8.7%. This is pretty close to the 9% that we predicted going into the holiday season. The chart below provides market share growth for our Retail 100 index (top 100 retailers in our Shopping & Classifieds Category) for 2004 versus 2005.
It is interesting to note in the same release, Spending Pulse stated that the Home & Garden category was one of the greatest gainers this year versus last. We’re seeing a 17% increase year-over-year compared to MasterCard’s 15.2%. Here’s the chart:
One other stand-out of the release was that jewelry sales were down 4.6% this year. This year, we were expecting to see a spike in searches on “engagement rings” for the week preceding Thanksgiving (as we saw in 2004). Looking at data through this week, we’ve seen no holiday spike on what must be one of the key revenue drivers for jewelers this time of year.
This is very interesting. I wonder if this means that people are either waiting to pop the big question after the holidays or purchasing rings in the spring for a summer proposal.
BJ, we’ll know next week, as historically we usually see a big spike in searches on “wedding dresses” (no kidding)