• by January 17, 2001

Not unlike ad ratings of Christmas Past, store, site, and brand performance is equally important in planning for the future. According to statistics released by Media Metrix, unique visitors to retail Web sites on average reached 34.3 million each week during the 2000 holiday shopping season, up 30.3% over last year. The visits surpassed the Web's overall growth of 18.6% during the same period. (Nov. 26, through Dec. 24.)

Six of the top ten gaining retail sites were traditional offline brands - Walmart.com, Bestbuy.com, AmericanGreetings.com, Staples.com, Hallmark.com and Sears.com.

Amazon.com is the number-one retail site over the five-week holiday season for the second year in a row, with a year-over-year increase in holiday-season traffic of 47.8%.

Walmart.com was the top gaining retail site with a year-over-year increase of 640% percent in holiday season traffic compared to last year. The five-week traffic average to Walmart.com grew from 50,000 average daily unique visitors over the 1999 holiday shopping season to 370,000 over the 2000 holiday shopping season.

Books sites were the top retail subcategory for the season with a five-week average of 2.3 million average daily unique visitors, surpassing last year's leader, computer sites, which had a five-week average of 2.1 million average daily unique visitors for the season.

Traffic to retail Web sites for the week ending Dec. 31 following the holiday-shopping season was down 15.2% compared to the holiday season average, the report found.