"Black Friday" may still rule the holiday retail vernacular, but upstart moniker "Cyber Monday" is gaining more and more traction.
With sales up 26 percent to $608 million, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the best single day in retail e-commerce history, according to ComScore Networks. Well, that was until "Net-terrific Tuesday" equaled those numbers the following day. Online spending was up 24 percent overall for November, with $11.7 billion in sales. ComScore expected Internet sales for November and December to be up by 24 percent to $24.3 billion.
These figures show that online retailing is unlikely to do anything but continue to grow in 2007.
"It's got everybody's attention," jewelry industry analyst Ken Gassman says."Online seems to be smoking."
While it seems most jewelers have been waiting to see flames shooting up before they make a real online push, Jewelers of America's Cost of Doing Business Survey, 2006 indicates they're starting to wake up and smell the e-commerce. Or, at the very least, more jewelers seem to acknowledge the fact—touted by Gassman and others—that to exist today, a retailer must have a Web presence: I'm online, therefore I am.
In 2000, 28 percent of retailers surveyed said they had no plans to use the Internet. That number dropped to 15 percent in 2005. At the same time, the number of jewelry retailers who say they are using the Internet for "promotional purposes" has nearly doubled, from 23 percent in 2000 to 40 percent in 2006. Another 24 percent said they plan to use the Internet soon, while 21 percent are using it both for marketing and sales.
Alson Jewelers in Cleveland spent about $12,000 to improve its Web site last year, says owner Chad Schreibman.
"It's not e-commerce, but we are showing more product than we have in the past, and we're showing a lot of designers," he says.
At this point the site remains promotional only, but he expects it will eventually include a sales component.
"I'm sure we'll get there. I think we'll have no choice at some point," Schreibman says.
Gassman says online jewelry sales made up 3.5 percent of total fine jewelry sales in 2005 and he expects that number will be just over 4 percent in 2006.
He predicts sales for the Internet will continue to grow this year, though there will be smaller percentage gains as the channel matures. For instance, he says Nielsen Net Ratings measured an increase of 12 percent in Web shoppers for Black Friday 2006 versus 2005, versus a 30 percent jump the year before.
"This slowdown is simply a reflection of fewer new Internet users logging in," Gassman says. With an estimated two-thirds of consumers already shopping online, the sales growth figures won't have the same dramatic increases of the past.
Still, it's going to command more of the business, whether jewelers like it or not.
"I think it's only the beginning," says Ben Janowski of Janos Consultants. "As much as we've been talking about it for 10 years, the Net is still young and it's still developing as a tool…It's an aspect of the business that's totally underused by conventional retailers, but the bottom line is it's where a very large piece of the future business is going to sit." nj