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Retail Shops See Modest Gain; E-tailers See 15.5% Sales Bump

Before we examine larger retailing trends and take a look at what stores of the future might be offering, let's get down to the brass tack of the just-concluded holiday shopping season. The verdict is that retailers got a "modest gift" -- a 3.6% sales increase over last year Nov. 1 to Dec. 24, according to SpendingPulse, an information service of MasterCard Advisors. Online spending, meanwhile, leaped 15.5%.

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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