Consumers start electronics holiday shopping early in November

Christmas shopping in the consumer electronics category began to heat up as early as the first week in November, according to numbers from Nielsen/NetRatings. All computers and consumer electronics web sites hosted 7.96 million visitors for the week ending Nov. 9, up 27% from traffic in June, Nielsen/NetRatings reports.

The top consumer electronics site was eBay Electronics, which hosted 2.3 million visitors. Next was BestBuy.com, with 1.49 million visitors, followed by Sony with 988,000 and CircuitCity.com with 655,000.

Nielsen/NetRatings also reported that for the week ending Nov. 9, Netflix Inc. was the No. 1 retail goods and services advertiser, with it ads creating 789.6 million impressions online. The other top advertisers were:
• eBay.com,, 376.5 million
• Amazon.com, 364.4 million
• Classmates.com, 160.7 million
• 1-800-Contacts.com, 160.7 million
• Udate.com, 141 million
• eBay individual sellers (as a group), 118.6 million
• eBay auction sellers (as a group), 109.1 million
• Terra Lycos, 105. 8 million
• Barnes & Noble, 103.9 million