Overstock.com, Sharper Image, Amazon report strong holiday sales

With online holiday sales overall running well ahead of last year, a number of web sites are reporting their strongest-ever holiday shopping seasons. Overstock.com Inc. said consumer spending between Nov. 29 and Dec. 25 rose 164% year-to-year, to $25.2 million from $9.5 million. Sharper Image Corp. said December online sales through Christmas Eve rose 68% over last year. And Amazon.com Inc. said it completed its busiest holiday shopping season with 56 million items ordered.

Overstock said its strongest sales were in books, DVDs, and CDs, with strong growth also in consumer electronics, watches and apparel. Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne attributed much of the growth to consumers’ increasing preference to use the web for price comparisons and the convenience of shopping from home. He also said that women shoppers have emerged as a more significant online shopping force as they’ve become more comfortable with buying online. "As a result, I believe this is the first year in which women used the Internet for a significant portion of their holiday shopping."

At Sharper Image, overall December multi-channel sales rose 28% year-to-year, to a record-breaking $111 million from $86 million. But the 68% growth in Internet sales far surpassed all other channels, the company said. Combined catalog and TV infomercial sales rose 36%, while sales at stores open at least a year rose 7%.

Amazon reported record holiday sales with 56 million items ordered between Nov. 1 and Dec. 23. Although it didn’t offer a direct comparison to last year, when it recorded 37.9 million items ordered between Nov. 9 and Dec. 21, it said 2002 amounted to its busiest holiday season ever.

Amazon said its largest single sales day was Mon., Dec. 9, with 1.7 million units ordered worldwide, or 20 items per second. It said the second largest sales day was Wed., Dec. 11, a day before the ordering deadline for a holiday free-shipping offer. The company attributed the increased activity to a broader assortment of product categories and to an extension of its free-shipping offer to Dec. 12, 8 days later than last year. It cited wireless phones and DVDs as the hottest selling products this year. And it said its new Apparel & Accessories store, launched in the fall, proved to be the fastest-growing Amazon store ever in terms of number of items sold in the first 45 days. In addition, it reported that 62,000 gift certificates were ordered worldwide on a single day, Dec. 24.

Fulfillment also improved at Amazon, which said it shipped more than 99% of holiday orders to U.S. destinations in time to meet holiday deadlines.