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E-commerce took away the heavyweight title from this years Thanksgiving sales weekend, which peaked with the Cyber Monday shopping frenzy, but the online commerce industry is beginning to slow, WWD reports.
Though sales figures have been high this holiday season, the overall numbers haven't shown as much year-over-year growth in the e-commerce sector as they have previously. Marshal Cohen, NPD's chief industry analyst, told WWD he considers the lower gains for online to be part of "the natural maturation process of a young, growing business."
According to Cohen, the slowdown comes at least in part from stores being better equipped to fight for sales this year.
"This year for the first time the brick-and-mortar stores did a much better job of developing a strategy and fighting back against online's gains. They were criticized for extending their hours into Thanksgiving, but they knew how important it was to take a traditional, rather than religious, holiday and commercialize it, as they previously had other nonreligious holidays."
Also, stores that traditionally sought to keep news of their big promotions secret until the last minute now make a point of announcing them well in advance to build buzz and demand, Cohen points out.
So basically, if that strategy is working as well as Cohen says it is, we can look forward to sales starting earlier on holidays (not at Nordstrom, though), more marketing emails announcing sales inundating our inboxes, and more crazy people camping out at Best Buy.
· E-commerce's Glow Dims as Stores Grow Aggressive [WWD]
· Wal-Mart, Target Employees Protest Black Friday Hours [Racked]