Black Friday No Biggie for E-Tailers

Legend has it that on Black Friday, the post-Thanksgiving day when shoppers clog the malls, many retailers move into the black for the year.

Not so for e-tailers.

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First, few are making profits anyway, so moving into the black isn't a possibility for now (the question remains whether it ever will be, but that's another story). Second, turkey-sated consumers are still more likely to spend Friday browsing the mall than sitting in front of the computer. And finally, over the past few weeks, online shoppers started ordering -- for e-tailers, the holiday season has already begun.

"While we certainly expect a lot of people to start their shopping this week, we won't see the same pattern on Friday" as at the mall, says Fiona Swerdlow, an analyst with Jupiter Communications. "It's a big day for going to the store and looking at windows." That's also what Sears (S) predicts, saying that it expects shoppers to push off logging on until Sunday evening, after they've toured a few malls.

The patterns of online shopping, says Swerdlow, mirror catalog shopping more than traditional mall-cruising. That means, in some cases, an early start on shopping. A Goldman Sachs survey found that 50% of online shoppers have already begun to shop, while the other half expect to start over the long weekend, says Anthony Noto, a Goldman analyst.

"We've seen shoppers start a little early," says Paul Capelli, spokesman for Amazon.com (AMZN), who says traffic started picking up about two weeks ago. Thomas Weisel Partners put out a note indicating that Amazon's average daily traffic for the week ended Nov. 21 was up nearly 50% from the previous week, according to research from Media Metrix.

To be sure, procrastination isn't going away. Traditional retailers have seen consumers push off their shopping until the very last minute, and many online shoppers will likely try to cut it close, too, says Swerdlow. But don't expect the kind of price-slashing that traditional retailers save for post-Christmas sales; waiting until after the big day itself isn't likely to yield the same kind of bargains. "Demand in the online world is more than supply," says Noto. "The opposite is true with land-based retailers."

Even as most people headed outside Friday, some had no choice but to confine their post-Thanksgiving spree to the Web. Heidi Anderson, a second-year resident at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, had to work today. During a break, she went online and spent about $100 on gifts. "If I wasn't working, I'd be out there," she says wistfully.

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