Traffic to Shopping Sites Down Across the Board

With unemployment, recession, and financial bailouts all over the news, I began to wonder how holiday shopping online would compare to last year.

It's basically down across the spectrum, if traffic to shopping sites is any indication. From bellwethers of online shopping like eBay and Amazon.com to online homes of traditional retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, traffic peaks slightly lower than last year's.

It's interesting to note that Amazon.com has a slightly larger increase for holiday traffic compared to pre-holiday traffic than it had last year. Are there Kindles to be gifted? Are more shoppers than usual looking for bargains on Amazon? Or are people, like me, traveling for the holidays and taking advantage of having their gifts shipped to their destinations rather than dragging them through airports?

Have your holiday shopping patterns changed this year over last? Let us know in the comments.

Alexa Haiku

I participated in a keynote panel at AddonCon yesterday, which incidentally was a terrific conference. There are a lot of people doing interesting work out there. Some examples, all from the keynote panel: Foxmarks (synchronize your bookmarks and get recommendations), Glue, by Adaptive Blue (social surfing... see who else visited this page and what they thought), One Riot (social search engine and hot urls features.) Not to leave anybody out, we also had Conduit and CoolIris on the panel as well (both fine products.)

Each of the panelists were asked by our moderator, Jeremy Liew, to write a haiku explaining their business. I wish I had written them all down because they were entertaining. Alec Jeong, of CoolIris, had arguably the best haiku. But he had some help from his wife, who is Japanese. I don't think any of us had any previous experience writing haikus, and we were all pushed out of our comfort zone. Some of the haikus were literal. Some were funny. Some were thought-provoking.

Here is what I came up with for Alexa. (It is best to say these slowly and thoughtfully...)

This site is obscure
Can I get some more info?
I'll try Alexa

Anybody else care to give it a try? Write a haiku about your business or about Alexa. Here are the rules. The first line is 5 syllables, the second is 7, and the third is 5. For examples and other subtleties regarding haikus check out the Wikipedia entry for Haiku.

Post yours in the comments. Our comments are moderated, so make it good. I'll pick the winner and kick in a million free 125X125 ad impressions on Alexa (a $3,000 value.)

Black Friday This Year and Last

Since we've been having all this trouble with the economy, and with all the companies announcing layoffs and the like, in addition to crossing my fingers, I have been curious about how all of this would impact the holidays. One thing I like about Alexa's historical traffic data is that I can compare this year's traffic to last year's traffic to certain sites.

One type of site that really applies here are those leaking Black Friday ads. Because Black Friday is traditionally seen as the beginning of the holiday shopping season, these sites can show some interesting comparisons year over year. The most popular of which I am aware are blackfriday.info and bfads.net, and shoplocal.com.

The traffic to all three of these sites was greater last year than this year. Does this mean that fewer people were searching for bargains this holiday season? Not likely, given the stories of extreme shopping such as the unfortunate trampling death of a worker at a chain store that morning. What seems more likely is that there are fewer who are able to shop at all. Whatever the reason, it might be wise to brace yourselves for hand-made sweaters and scarves from your relatives this holiday season.