Holiday e-commerce spending rose 26% over 2005. Online luxury goods sales went wild.Traffic to the website for luxury retailer Coach (COH) rose 25%. Watch company Fossil had a 56% increase in traffic. In the shipping category, UPS (UPS) web traffic was up 26%.
But, PC website traffic was weak. Computer hardware sites showed a 9% increase in traffic during December. Apple (AAPL) lead the pack, up 17%. But, visits to the Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) website were up only 7% to 14 million visitors. This was ahead of Dell (DELL) which had 13 million.
Obviously, online purchases of PCs are not the only sales channel that they have, but, it is an important one. And, that makes the figures a bad omen.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at douglasamcintyre@247wallst.com. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
