The holiday shopping season is officially upon us and for some online retailers, prospects may be rosier than expected thanks to heavy promotional activity to encourage spending (and unfortunately also erode profit margins). On Thanksgiving, which has been the heaviest day of traffic to online retailers over the past 4 years, experienced an 11 percent decline in the market share of visits as compared to last year. The websites of brick & mortar retailers took a harder hit with a 16% decline as compared to last year, while traffic to web-only retailers was up 11%.
For Black Friday, traffic to the Retail 500 was down 5% year-over-year, with the brick & mortar players also down 10%. Web-only retailers also fared better with a 10% increase over last year, where Black Friday was the peak traffic day of the holiday season (followed by Cyber Monday, suggesting today may also prove fruitful).

We have watched traffic decline across the majority of product categories over the past 12 weeks with the exceptions of Classifieds, Grocery & Alcohol, and Health & Beauty. Last week traffic increased slightly for the Books and Sports & Fitness categories, while the traffic for holiday mainstays like Apparel was flat & Appliances & Electronics was still down.

Last year, we saw traffic to retail websites increase 22% on Cyber Monday, which was much larger than the 8% increase between the 2005 & 2006 holiday seasons. We may see a double-digit increase for some of the online-only retailers today, but that may not be the case across the board.