Analysts caution that last year was so bad that sales had almost nowhere to go but up. "We're still shy of the levels we saw from a couple years ago," says Kamalesh Rao, director of economic research at SpendingPulse.
Online shopping was spurred by consumers' increasing comfort with e-tailing and free-shipping offers and discounts, analysts tell Andrea Chang and Alejandro Lazo. "People are using it as a tool to research products as well as find competitive pricing," says Brent Schoenbaum, a retail partner at Deloitte & Touche.
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