November 25, 2003

Early indicators show that consumers are going online to buy their holiday gifts earlier this year than last year. If they don't exhaust themselves shopping, or if they don't run out of money, the current pace could bode well for the holiday shopping season.

"E-commerce is off to a positive start," wrote Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, in a note released late Monday. The study, which looked at the two weeks ending Nov. 14, reinforced Internet industry themes that Noto articulated earlier this year: Online shopping is penetrating the mass market and broadband adoption is helping improve the shopping experience.

Goldman's study, along with Harris Interactive and Nielsen/NetRatings, showed that consumers started shopping earlier this year compared to last year. Satisfaction continues to improve for the third straight year as 24 percent of respondents are more satisfied than last year and 89 percent are likely to shop again.

Consumers are still concerned with excessive shipping costs, inability to find a product, lack of inventory, or information and security, according to the study.

Consumers were also asked which search engines or shopping portals they visited to find online stores over a one-week period. The study showed that 40 percent went to Yahoo's search or directly to Yahoo Shopping. Google ranked second with 37 percent of the traffic. EBay came in third followed by Microsoft's MSN, Amazon.com's Ask Jeeves and BizRate.

Two percent of those surveyed said they went to either Time Warner's AOL Shopping or Shopping.com.

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