Winter blizzard leads to high online sales in US

Online retailers on East Coast, US made merry a little before Christmas. A winter blizzard that buried much of the mid-Atlantic between one to two feet of snow last weekend led to higher sales. The final week of online holiday sales reached a new record of $4.8 billion. A 11 per cent increase over 2008, according to new data released by ComScore.

The 2009 season, 1 November to 20 December, saw overall online sales of $25.5 billion, a 4 per cent gain over last year. When the blizzard hit on the final weekend before Christmas, online sales jumped 13 per cent.

"The major snowstorms hitting the Eastern Seaboard over the weekend appear to have given holiday e-commerce an additional boost, resulting in the heaviest online spending week on record at $4.8 billion," ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement.

Sales and conversion rates were up about 15 per cent over the weekend for apparel and fashion online retailers whose sites are operated by eFashionSolutions, which reported that during the period of the storm, a lot of people were converting, not just browsing.

Targeting customers trapped in their homes with weather-specific ad copy boosted sales even further, according to Internet Retailer. PM Digital placed ads for its clients on weather-related sites on the Google Content Network, such as Weather.com or the weather pages of newspaper sites, and targeted consumers searching for terms like "blizzard" and "northeastern snowstorm."

"Mother Nature was very unkind to retailers on Saturday as the year-over-year sales decline was the largest we've seen since we began reporting this number in 2002," ShopperTrak co-founder Bill Martin said in a statement.

The ComScore data shows that even during -- or perhaps because of -- the recession, consumers continue to increase their online holiday shopping. Last weekend's storm seems to have provided the final boost for the online numbers.