All retailers rely heavily on the holiday season to boost their sales - with more and more of these sales now taking place online. According to a recent report by Internet Retailer, publicly traded companies saw their online sales grow by a collective 21% in the 3rd quarter.

Below is a list of the Top 10 biggest winners and losers so far this holiday season in terms of attracting traffic to their Web sites. We looked at traffic to their sites for Thanksgiving week (2007) through the first 2 weeks of December, comparing data from 2007 and 2008. We then ranked the sites that have seen the greatest % increase and decrease in traffic during this same time period.

Some interesting notes:

• Proflowers is seeing a surge in their holiday traffic while 1-800-Flowers has seen a slight decline of -1%. With Valentine’s Day just around the corner it will be interesting to see if 1-800-Flowers can change, or at least slow, this trend…
• Similarly, while Snapfish has enjoyed a strong holiday season, traffic to rival Shutterfly has stayed relatively flat, and is down -1%. Read Compete’s recent article comparing these two companies here.
• Blockbuster rival, Netflix, has seen their traffic remain flat Year/Year.
• Traffic to Walmart.com and Target.com is up 12, and 11% respectively.
• Gap, Inc. launched an integrated store and shopping basket strategy earlier this year combining Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Piperlime into one unified online location. While I personally love this idea and new site/s, traffic to these sites is down this holiday season:
  • OldNavy.com -15%
  • BananaRepublic.com -13%
  • Gap.com -3%

  Based on the early reports of strong holiday sales for Gap, Inc. it will be interesting to see the breakdown of online vs offline sales. It will also be interesting to perform an Online Sales Funnel Analysis of these new entities and learn if there are any marked increases.

• Conversely, Sears Holdings also developed a unified online location for their entities, and traffic is up at their major stores:
  • Kmart.com +37%
  • Sears.com +17%
  • LandsEnd.com +13%

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