Does Online Shopping Kill Stores?

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 29, 2:27PM EST

ComScore has come out with its data on Cyber-Monday, the weird appellation given to the first day after the Thanksgiving weekend. The day went better than expected. Revenue from online ecommerce hit $608 million, up 26% from a year ago. The largest one-day total ever. For the first 27 days of November, online ecommerce revenue was up 24% to $9.84 billion.

Putting these number next to the same-store sales drop-off at Wal-Mart. Same-store sales across the industry rose 2.5% in November according to the International Counsil Of Shopping Centers. The trade group said this was the slowest month since March.

Althought there is a dearth of good data on what online shopping takes from the so-called "bricks and mortar" world, it is hard to imagine that there is not some element of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

Online sales may be doing fine. But, if off-line sales are not, a false sense of how well the retail sector is going might tempt investors to be overly confident. That could be a mistake.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.