Holiday Shopping Season Off To Strong Start Online

Online retail sales on Black Friday rose 22 percent versus a year ago

By
Mon, November 26, 2007

CIO — E-commerce companies weren't blue on Black Friday.

Having prepared their sites and supply chains for the biggest shopping season of the year, online retailers welcomed a rush of shoppers who spent $531 million on their hearts' desires the day after Thanksgiving. That's up 22 percent compared to last year's Black Friday, according to comScore, an online researcher.

So far in November, online purchasing amounts to $9.4 billion, up 17 percent from the $8 billion booked during the same period a year ago, comScore says. Video games and accessories were by far the most-bought items, followed by furniture and appliances, consumer electronics and sports gear. Unlike in years past, when IT failures wrecked the holidays for consumers and companies alike, no major outages at big e-commerce sites have been reported so far.

Perhaps the turkey roasting didn't go well for some, however: Online shoppers spent $272 million on Thanksgiving Day itself.

As Active Directory's role in the enterprise has drastically increased, so has the need to secure the data. Gain insight on creating repeatable, enforceable processes that reduces administrative overhead and enables robust, customizable reporting and auditing capabilities. Brought to you by NetIQ.
This white paper from Forrester Research Inc., helps break PCI into understandable components. Security and risk professionals will gain knowledge and insight into creating a compliant and secure IT environment. Follow these four proactive steps now before your next audit. Brought to you by NetIQ.
Smarter Commerce is redefining the value chain in the age of the customer. It starts with putting the customer at the center of your operations - which of itself is not a new idea - however, truly operationalizing this strategy is not easy.
In this ever-changing world of software development, it's critical to keep up with technologies, methodologies and trends. Discover five tested and proven software development practices your team should be utilizing to accelerate software delivery.
A typical corporation spends between 60-80% of its IT budget maintaining existing systems. No wonder that many organizations are now considering modernizing legacy systems. In this whitepaper, three case studies illustrate how organizations have leveraged Make Technologies to modernize their legacy systems safely, efficiently, and inexpensively.
Aging application portfolios are putting many companies at risk. Typically, these organizations need a roadmap to modernize their application portfolios. This whitepaper discusses a step-by-step approach for legacy modernization, including portfolio assessment and developing a roadmap. It also considers necessary considerations for a scalable modernization project.
This webinar will cover five tested and proven software development practices that your team should be utilizing right now to accelerate software delivery.
Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations
Download this webcast to learn the virtual hardware design considerations for Exchange 2010, deployment using the building block approach, options for high-availability and disaster recovery and support considerations.
Virtualizing business-critical applications has become a key focus for organizations as they move along their virtualization journey. With the launch of VMware vSphere® 5, VMware is helping customers accelerate the deployment of business-critical applications, including Exchange, SQL, SAP and Oracle.
Want to say goodbye to missed SLAs? VMware can help you virtualize mission-critical applications such as Oracle, MS Exchange and SharePoint to achieve dramatic improvements in uptime, performance and responsiveness. In this webcast, we'll discuss the key benefits of virtualizing your agency's most critical applications and Oracle databases as a necessary first step in fulfilling OMB's mandate to move IT services to the cloud. With VMware, you'll be on the way to quick, effective and full compliance.
The complexity, cost and technological bloat of traditional Java EE application servers are often barriers to running a lean and efficient IT organization. Increased need for scalability and rapid application delivery are driving businesses to reconsider the platform they use for application deployment. By combining the portability and agility of the Spring framework with a lightweight application server, your organization can meet business demands while staying within budget constraints. VMware vFabric™ tc Server is a modern, lightweight Java application server based on Apache Tomcat. It improves developer productivity, control and manageability-and is the most flexible platform for virtualizing Java applications and workloads for the cloud. View this webcast to learn about real-world examples of companies that have adopted VMware vFabric tc Server and how to plan for future cloud deployments.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center