• by Masha Geller , November 24, 2002

With only a few weeks left of the holiday shopping season, it’s nice to know that things are moving along quite well for the e-commerce universe. comScore Networks has released the first 2002 installment of its annual measurement of holiday e-commerce, and total online consumer sales for the week ending Nov. 17 reached $1.5 billion, which is actually up 28% from the same period last year.

Online spending for non-travel goods and services increased on a sequential basis, from $905 million the week ending Nov. 10 to $976 million the week ending Nov. 17. However, year-over-year growth in non-travel spending slowed from 34% to 16% over the same weeks. Collectively, these data suggest that the 2002 online holiday shopping season is picking up steam but still is not fully underway yet.

The double-digit gains posted in online non-travel sales have been fueled by significant increases in the number of online buyers versus last year. The week ending Nov. 17 saw 9.2 million Internet users buying online, up 36% versus the same week last year. Key non-travel categories with significant increases in the number of buyers for the latest week versus year-ago include: Toys, up 37%; Movies and Video, up 68%; Flowers and Gifts, up 103%; Consumer Electronics, up 92%; and Apparel, up 70%.

Worldwide visitors to Shopping sites slowly but steadily increased since the late summer and reached 112.6 million in the week ending Nov. 10, the highest level since April 2002. comScore will continue to monitor traffic patterns to shopping sites and note key trends and movement of specific sites throughout the holiday season. Predictably, the top shopping site is Amazon.com. The rest of the top ten are Dell.com, Dealtime.com, Freeze.com, Pricegrabber.com, Columbiahouse.com, Cdnow.com, Coolsavings.com, Walmart.com, Hallmark.com and Barnesandnoble.com.