According to Jupiter, Net retailers that saw greatest increase in sales also have a brick component. While Internet as a whole experienced a 50 percent increase in sales, traditional retailers saw their Web sales grow by 73 percent over 2000. "We've been waiting for inevitable dominance of traditional retailers over their pure-play counterparts, and it appears that 2001 may have been year when it finally happened," said Ken Cassar, senior analyst at Jupiter Research. "With a few exceptions such as Amazon.com, dominant retailers that sell merchandise directly from their sites tend to be affiliated with brick-and-mortar stores and catalogs." The top three traditional retailers during holiday season were Columbia House, with 598,000 average daily unique visitors, Toysrus with 515,000 and Barnesandnoble with 447,000.

As well as good news, there were also some less exciting developments during holiday season. The volume of orders that did not arrive on time for Christmas did not improve over 2000. Both years came in with a dismal 12 percent late delivery. The top performers for on-time delivery were sporting goods, health and beauty, and food and drink. Many online retailers blamed late shipments on delivery services. As for actual in-stock items, Net retailers actually did better than year before, so there may be some merit to their complains about delivery companies.

Overall, 2001 holiday season was more than a silver lining around dark cloud of 2001 dot com disaster. The Christmas season may actually have ushered in a break in stormy clouds, and that could indicate some real sunshine. Online retailing is clearly here to stay, even if big numbers are collecting on balance sheets of major offline retailers.

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