Online Retail Sales Could Double This Holiday Season

By Dan Verton

October 16, 2000 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Experts predicted last week that fourth-quarter online retail sales will double compared with last year.
The forecast, by Gomez Advisors Inc., an electronic-commerce benchmarking firm in Lincoln, Mass., estimates that online retail sales during the fourth quarter will reach $11.4 billion, more than double the $5.2 billion in sales reported by the U.S. Department of Commerce during the same period last year. This year's growth will be driven by an increase in the number of people who view the Internet as a valuable shopping tool, according to Gomez. It will also be fueled by companies' efforts to improve service - particularly order fulfillment - for existing online customers, the study found.

			Lack of Privacy Policies Impedes E-Retailers Lack of clear-cut, understandable privacy policies could be the biggest impediment to online retailers this year as they gear up for the hectic fourth-quarter holiday buying season. A new study released last week by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. and Vividence Corp., a San Mateo-Calif.-based company that specializes in evaluating Web sites, found that the more satisfied online buyers are with a Web site's privacy policy, the more comfortable they will be when they shop at that site. The Forrester study, "Web Buyers Speak Out About Privacy Policies," surveyed 400 Web buyers and analyzed their attitudes toward online privacy on eight major retail sites. The study evaluated the privacy policies of Amazon.com, Barbie.com, eToys.com, Fisher-Price.com, JCPenney.com, KBkids.com, Toysrus.com and Walmart.com. The Web buyers rated each site's privacy policies from zero to 100, based on the ease of locating the policy, their overall satisfaction with the policy and their comfort level in shopping at the site after reading the policy. At least five of the sites received "mediocre" scores of between 60 and 76 because of policies that were difficult to understand or failed to explain terms and principles. The site that received the lowest score, a 39, used a text link that blended into the site's background and made the policy hard to find. Although Forrester didn't identify the names of the Web sites that earned the mediocre or poor scores, the firm did announce that two of the eight sites, KBkids.com and eToys.com, finished ahead of the rest in all areas evaluated. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an online privacy watchdog group in Washington, called online privacy the "No. 1 consumer issue." He said online merchants have to do more to convince consumers that their private information won't be misused. "The policies generally are very weak," said Rotenberg. "People still don't trust that their information is not going to be abused."

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