How Were Your Christmas Sales?

was it THAT bad?

[jsinger]

Christmas isn't very important to our sales. Our best season is coming up. I have to think that the lack of discussion about the Christmas season means that business wasn't very good.

Mainline press reports agree that Christmas online was good. But the popular press is often way off the mark in covering the web.

How'd you guys do in Nov/Dec?

[Essex_boy]

My site only sells during the winter I have never had an order from anybody outside of October - February, so its a bit early to tell now however things are looking good, easily on a par with last year.

I have a new site im setting and cant wait for next Christmas now.....

only 36X days to go.

[RedWolf]

Mostly I am relaxing a it after a massive building run the two weekes before Christmas and constant trips to ship out orders. My gut feel is that they were as good or better than last year, but I haven't completed adding the totals up yet. I have that planned for tomorrow, since I have five pieces I need to finish that were ordered yesterday that I don't have in stock. I get about half as many orders in the week after Christmas and in the week before so it stays fairly busy here. I was surprised to not get many orders Thursday and Friday. I really expected a lot more last minutes, but it did make for a lot less stress on my part to make sure they shipped on time.

[rocknbil]

Wife's biz is a small retailer, call it a "different" kind of gift shop, and we are small potatoes compared to most of you.

We attend a small local group, nothing like a chamber of commerce, just a small group of business owners that gets together every month and discusses our challenges and how we overcome them. It has been a GREAT experience.

Anyway sales for everyone else in the group and in town just dropped off in December, attributing the losses to sales at Wally World. Even "Freddy's" was empty.

But on both the web and locally, our sales shot up 200% or more. See small potatoes above, this may not be much in the grand scheme but hey, 200% is 200%. :-D

[oldpro]

Sale were the best ever...and since the day after Christmas it is still going strong.

[coultog]

We've only been trading a year and only started out with a thousand bucks initial investment.

November we turned over twice more than we have in any other month and in the first fifteen days of December, we turned over almost three times more than we did in November.

Closed the year around £25K revenue and 600% profit. Very pleased.

[sniffer]

Sales pre Christmas were great
Sales after Christmas and before new year are extremely slow. It doesnt help that Australia has Christmas over summer and everybody is at the beach enjoying the sunshine

[jwolthuis]

Closed the year around £25K revenue and 600% profit. Very pleased.

600% of what? The £25K?

Very Nice! What's your secret?

[wyweb]

December sucked all the way around. It always does. Traffic sucked, sales sucked, ad revenue sucked... In years past I charted it so I could document the drop, 20%, 25%, 30% etc... This year I'm not even going to bother. Too depressing. The good news is that relief is on the way. Heeelllooooooo 2007!

[pageoneresults]

From Comscore...

Online sales for the 56 days through Dec. 26 jumped to $23.1 billion, Reston, Va.-based ComScore Networks Inc. said Friday. The results exceeded ComScore's own estimate of a 25 percent gain for November and December, prompting the firm to raise the projection to 26 percent.

Decking the Virtual Halls
[fool.com...]

I think everyone (well, almost everyone) is still recovering from a record year. ;)

[jsinger]

How come many e-commerce stocks haven't done well amid a generally very strong market this year? Ebay, Blue Nile, Amazon, Yahoo? Flat to down.

I think a lot of the gain is 25% more and bigger sites spending ever more on advertising while slashing prices.

Free shipping deals were everywhere again after having faded a few years ago.

[aleatrix]

I've been too busy to even log onto Webmaster's World until now. No hard figures yet, but I'd say at least as good as last holiday season, probably better, and I'm still getting orders!

[Essex_boy]

Its at the point whered Id say the UK is in recession

[Label_Lady]

We did more $$$business in one day this December than we did in all of December 05.

[LostOne]

"Ebay, Blue Nile, Amazon, Yahoo? "

Out of favor? It's not just activity or profit that boosts a stock price. The herd likes other stuff out there.

[akmac]

Very strong December for us. About 4x gross receipts on just over 2x the traffic compared to last year. We expect a strong Christmas, but were surprised by this year's gains.

[ItsAllBallBearings]

strong season, but about 25% off where we expected due to some unexpected MFG issues...see other threads abotu this one :(

Satisfied overall with the season, though the week after has been slower than usual. We typically see strong sales through Jan, but it hasnt been there since the 25th.

[fiu88]

The Christmas season is sort of a non-event for us...However, we've been experiencing a much stronger demand for our bigger ticket items...ASP is way up...and January is off to a booming start...

[engine]

Online retailers look set to be crowned among the victors of the Christmas trading war this year alongside an uneven showing on the high street.

Internet sales in Britain for the first time peaked during the start of seasonal discounting last week after surging more than 50 percent in the run up to Christmas, online retail tracker IMRG reported.

Online retailers winners in Christmas trading [today.reuters.co.uk]

[wingslevel]

pretty scary when you have to achieve 25% growth just to maintain share

[mindanao]

I had a great Christmas season for sales! I have about 20 different stores on the net, and my overall increase was around 200% over last December.

Sales are still running strong!

[mida68]

Most of my clients saw a steady increase in sales for 2006 with the "shopping season" bringing in record sales. It depends on the business, but one client really broke out of the "mom & pop" pack this year - that's why I'm searching so diligently for a new cart solution to integrate their accounting, inventory, and shipping - freeing them up to work on PR and marketing!

[hellraiser1]

pre xmas sales really depends on your market and other factors. In late november and december, our volume and income was 1,000 to 1,200 percent what we did in the preceding months --- thats 10 - 12 TIMES more money in the pre xmas 6 weeks then ANY other 6 week period throughout the year. (so if we made $4,000 in october - we pulled in $45,000 in december --- granted we sell unique gifts and crafts) If you really think about it, some businesses can afford to stay open 10 other months of the year due to pre xmas sales, and other busineses drop sales in pre xmas. really depends i guess

[pbradish]

I had a good Xmas season but maybe a little too good as I run a new store (less than six months old) and had trouble keeping up with the order volume :)