Wednesday, December 27, 2000

Online Holiday Shoppers Take Fewer Chances

Media Metrix, a leader in Internet and Digital Media measurement worldwide, today announced that 33.8 million unique visitors went to online retail sites during the fourth week of the holiday-shopping season (week ending Dec. 17, 2000), down by 5.2 percent from its peak of 35.6 million during week two. However, traffic is up by 24.6 percent compared to the same week last year. Conversely, the Media Metrix Online Shopping Index, which aggregates Web visitors from both home and work to nearly 400 retail sites and 18 retail subcategories, last year peaked at 27.4 million unique visitors during week three of the holiday season.

“Last year online shoppers increasingly flocked to retail sites through the final days of the holiday season,” said Anne Rickert, measurement analyst, Media Metrix. “This year online shopping is up, but many who might have been disappointed with or fearful of late-arriving goods last year appear to have shopped earlier.”

Highlights of Week Four Study

Toysrus is a newcomer to the top ten rankings at number nine, with 371,000 average daily unique visitors.

Buy.com returns to the top ten retail site rankings for the first time since week one of the 2000 holiday-shopping season, with 438,000 average daily unique visitors.

Books site Enews.com and magazine site Literaryguild.com are the top two retail site gainers for the week ending Dec. 17, 2000, with week-over-week average daily unique visitor increases of 355.2 percent and 135.1 percent, respectively. Three of the top ten gainers are consumer electronics sites: Officedepot.com, Sonystyle.com and Getplugged.com.

Barbie.com and Peoplepc.com are the top retail sites according to composition of home usage, with more than 90 percent of their total traffic, respectively, coming from online shoppers at home. Six of the top ten retail sites according to composition of work usage are computer sites: Cisco.com, Cdw.com, Nai.com, Symantec.com, Hp.com and Compusa.com.

Online Credit Services Strengthen Bank Practices
Meridien Research, a leading financial industry technology analyst firm, announced today the availability of a new report entitled, " Credit Decisioning Engines — Volume vs. Relationships on the E-Channel." This 37-page report examines Web-based credit decisioning, the rush of lending institutions to compete online, and the vend ors offering decisioning engines. A case study on First Franklin Financial gives an example of an institution improving efficiencies and quality in an increasingly competitive market.

"While loan decisioning tools are not new, what is new is the advent of the online borrower, and the availability of credit at the point of impulse," says Tom Richards, Research Director at Meridien Research. "While the issue receiving the most attention is the Internet borrower, it is not the volume of online borrowers but the rush of lenders competing to capture them that is upending the industry."

Several elements play a role in online loan decisioning including lender policy, scores and models, third-party credit data, and the engine itself. Decision engines are rules-based processors and many support other decisioning tools, such as scorecards and matrices.

"Simple underwriting systems are now evolving into a new generation of solutions that apply business policy to a nearly infinite variety of customer behaviors through a combination of behavior scoring, inferences, and decision trees," continued Richards. "These engines assure that the application of decision-making policy can be deployed consistently across all channels. The combination of decision engines, workflow processors, and knowledge bases will rapidly develop into the expertise behind the channel for all products."

News Tidbits (appears every day on front page)
- Efforts to catch fraudulent sellers on eBay.com are succeeding. In the past week Federal officials arrested two people in connection with fraud charges on eBay. Online fraud carries stiff penalties - up to 75 years in prison for Hen Ben Haim of Southern California who cheated over 200 eBay customers out of $32,000 through fraudulent auctions.