• by May 17, 2001

Interactive Week reports that Shop.org and The Boston Consulting Group, in a recent report about the state of the online industry, found that catalogers - when compared to Web-only retailers and store-based or click-and-mortar retailers - are the "only consistently profitable" group of sellers.

The study reports that 72% of catalogers were profitable at an operating level, compared with 43% of store-based retailers and 27% of Web-based retailers.

- Catalog-based companies spent an average of $14 per customer on customer acquisition
- Store-based companies spent $34 on acquisition
- Web-based companies spent $55 on acquisition
- Catalogers saw 41 % of their shopping carts abandoned
- Store base retailers lost 64 % of their shoppers
- Web-only retailers lost 53%

Among the other information Shop.org and BCG found:

- Travel is the largest online retail category, at $13.8 billion market in 2000 and is expected to grow to $20.7 billion this year.
- Computer hardware and software came in second at $8.2 billion.
- By the close of 2000, 96 million consumers had browsed an online retail site, and 68 million had made an online purchase.
- About 40 % of online revenue in 2000 came from repeat buyers.
- Only 10 % of those surveyed had a WAP version of their Web site in 2000, and only 10 percent plan to launch one this year.

Read more at zdnet.