Shopping.com doubled its holiday traffic this past season, DM News reports today. Execs from the site are quick to claim that online shopping (or, as I like to call it, the shopping search vertical) has hit critical mass. It’s hard to argue. From the piece:
The San Francisco company doubled the number of unique visitors in the 2003 holiday season to 58 million and the number of shopping sessions to 69 million. Leads referred to merchants listed on the site grew 123 percent in holiday 2003 to 29 million, and sales for them rose 132 percent to $181 million. …
…Shopping.com … stood fourth among U.S. multi-category e-commerce sites for November in terms of unique monthly visitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, trailing only eBay, Amazon and Yahoo Shopping. Walmart.com, target.com and BizRate.com followed. …
….five years down the road, we’re seeing a rapid uptick of consumer awareness, interest and acceptance. In a sense, we’ve hit the tipping point, or critical mass. Major branded merchants have seen the market mature and are now interested in selling online.” ….
…”It’s been a landslide … and it shows no sign of stopping. Online shopping sites are no longer marketplaces of technical equipment for technical people. We’ve attracted and are repeatedly serving a much broader audience and general merchandise category mix.” …