• by Ross Fadner , January 5, 2004

The Internet has made holiday shopping unconscionably easier. As people continue to catch on, saving themselves a bundle in little intangibles like stress, so does the number of online retail sales.

The National Retail Federation predicts that when all the counting is done, 2003's holiday sales will be the biggest ever. It projects online sales for the full year will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $95.6 billion, or between 5 percent and 7 percent of total retail sales. In 2002, online sales totaled $75.7 billion, marking an increase of nearly 25 percent in 2003.

From November 17 to December 25, VISA USA reported that non-travel online retail sales increased a whopping 45 percent over the same period last year to $9 billion, with year to date sales as of December 25 up 37 percent.

"This level of rapid growth, however, can be a double edged sword for retailers if they are not prepared to handle the online onslaught," said Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst at Keynote System's public services group. "With consumers' increasingly heading to the Web for holiday shopping and other purchases, it is essential that retailers prepare their sites for larger loads all year, but especially during holiday periods."

Keynote Systems, which publishes an index for the Internet Performance Authority, recently released its Ecommerce Transaction Index for the busy week of December 22-28, which found that the average response time for completing an online transaction was 13.86 seconds, with a transaction completion percentage of 97.33.