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Forrester: 2013 Online Holiday Retail Sales To Hit $78.7 Billion

Forrester forecasts $78.7 billion in US online sales this holiday season (including mobile and tablet sales), projecting double-digit growth rates for the third year in a row with a 15% increase over 2012's $68.4 billion in sales.

This year, 167 million shoppers will go to the Web to do their holiday shopping, spending an average of $472 for the season.

"Strong economic growth and low unemployment rates project a healthy playing field for online holiday sales and outweigh any lingering dampening effect of the government shutdown," writes Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru in the new research report, US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2013.

Despite increased consumer spend, online retailers can't expect to see double-digit growth numbers without adhering to holiday retail best practices, notes Mulpuru. Retailers must take note of consumer expectations: In a recent Forrester survey of US online adults, 50% said they would consider buying from an online retailer that they had never bought from before if it offered the lowest shipping cost or free shipping, while 42% said the best deal offers would sway this decision.

"But with consumers now expecting them, discounts alone won't be enough to guarantee the results that retailers are looking for," writes Mulpuru.

As such, the most successful online retailers this holiday season will be those that use mobile to their advantage, capitalize on email lists to attract repeat shoppers, and, above all else, ensure that execution is flawless.

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Forrester Report: US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2013

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Forrester: 2013 Online Holiday Retail Sales To Hit $78.7 Billion

Forrester forecasts $78.7 billion in US online sales this holiday season (including mobile and tablet sales), projecting double-digit growth rates for the third year in a row with a 15% increase over 2012's $68.4 billion in sales.

This year, 167 million shoppers will go to the Web to do their holiday shopping, spending an average of $472 for the season.

"Strong economic growth and low unemployment rates project a healthy playing field for online holiday sales and outweigh any lingering dampening effect of the government shutdown," writes Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru in the new research report, US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2013.

Despite increased consumer spend, online retailers can't expect to see double-digit growth numbers without adhering to holiday retail best practices, notes Mulpuru. Retailers must take note of consumer expectations: In a recent Forrester survey of US online adults, 50% said they would consider buying from an online retailer that they had never bought from before if it offered the lowest shipping cost or free shipping, while 42% said the best deal offers would sway this decision.

"But with consumers now expecting them, discounts alone won't be enough to guarantee the results that retailers are looking for," writes Mulpuru.

As such, the most successful online retailers this holiday season will be those that use mobile to their advantage, capitalize on email lists to attract repeat shoppers, and, above all else, ensure that execution is flawless.

Related Links:

Forrester Report: US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2013

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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