Consumer online spending in the US declined by 3 percent during the last quarter of 2008 compared to the same period a year ago, according to research group comScore.
But despite the slight decline of online spending, this is still considerably a small triumph as the e-commerce industry’s sales raise by 6 percent compared to the 3rd quarter of last year. With this increase, the online sector has over 130.1 billion of combined sales.
In an interview, comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said that online businesses face a tough economic condition during the last holiday season when recession first hit the US economy caused by the housing industry collapse and credit-crunch.
Fulgoni said that the spending power of the consumers were greatly reduced as the country’s economic condition gets worse, adding that this result has already been expected by experts and analysts.
Meanwhile, the Fulgoni warned that online industry in 2009, especially its first few months, will be the same as last year because as the economy becomes more unstable and massive layoffs continue to hunt the labor market, consumers will be forced to cut their spending.
According to comScore, one of the affected industries is the jewelry which fell 12 percent last year compared with 2007. Meanwhile, the computer industry is also reeling from the impact of economic downturn, as software sales slumped to record-low of 18 percent.
The research firm also said that record industry’s (music and movies) sales fell by 23 percent. While the sharp decline has not yet been proven to be correlated with online piracy, record labels blamed bittorrent sites and illegal file-sharers for its slumping sales.
Despite sales decline in some industries, sport equipment and furniture have impressive profit growth.
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