Christmas Sales Proves Dot.Com Industry Alive and Well

Dot.com internet sales during the 2003 Christmas season once again hit high end projections of a 31% increase in business activity over last year. This compares to an overall increase in sales of approximately 5% when you include all Christmas sales from all sources. What is further significant is that although more and more people are using the Internet to make purchases it still only represents 3% of all sales this Christmas. This means that Internet vendors still have the potential to grab an even larger share of Christmas sales in the coming years.

Online vendors such as EBay will once again report record earnings for the year while online sales for computer-related products such as Apple and Dell continue to see record visitor counts to their sites.

Almost every type of dot.com business available on the web today has also seen a boom in traffic. Starboard TCN Worldwide Commercial Real Estate in the San Francisco Bay Area utilizes 22 different web sites to promote their property listings, as well as attract interested tenants and buyers looking for commercial real estate worldwide. At the beginning of the year, these 22 web sites attracted 90,000 visitors per month. December figures show that number has grown to over 140,000 visitors per month.

During the early days of oil exploration and car manufacturing there was an explosion of firms trying to secure their market share in an unknown and untested marketplace. Eventually over time, the strongest firms emerged and these marketplaces were controlled by a smaller group of firms.

After a similar explosion of firms with new but untested ideas, the dot.com marketplace is now maturing with fewer "players" that have a better sense of how to make money and effectively use the web to create new business opportunities.

Unfortunately, many traditional firms did not "stick it out" and have turned their web sites to "corporate brochures" as opposed to business generators. Theyare missing a valuable opportunity to secure their place in the largest growth sector of any marketing venue available to them today.