When Carrie Peters went to a Seattle mall this week to buy a bathing suit for vacation, she did a lot of running around, only to find swimwear is not on the shelves this season.
"I went to five different stores. Nobody had it," said Peters, who was hoping to try on a suit before buying it. "And if it was something that I could have found online, I would have much rather done that."
Peters, who works for Seattle-based Amazon.com, does much of her shopping online, from shoes to holiday gifts. Her purchases are part of a growing number of sales that are being made on the Internet.
Online retail sales totaled $11.06 billion during the third quarter, up 34 percent from the third quarter last year, according to estimates from the Census Bureau. That's 1.3 percent of total retail sales for the third quarter, compared with the 1.1 percent of total sales in the quarter last year.
"About a third of U.S. adults are buying online in a given quarter," said David Schehr, a research director who follows consumer behavior in retailing for GartnerG2, a unit of Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn.
Most of the growth in online retail has come from "multi-channel" retailers, or companies that consumers already know from stores or catalogs, he said. "The Internet becomes just another channel from which they can serve consumers," Schehr said.
Sears, Roebuck and Co., for instance, estimates that 1 out of 10 major appliance purchases at its stores are influenced by Sears.com. Although that Web site is not yet profitable itself, it is driving consumers to the store. Spokeswoman Ann Woolman said Sears.com expects to be profitable this year.
The Web site for Best Buy Co. Inc. also allows consumers to learn about products before they decide to buy them at the store or online, said company spokeswoman Donna Beadle.
"Bestbuy.com is not just an e-commerce site, it's also a site for research," she said.
About 40 percent of Best Buy's in-store shoppers visited the company's Web site before coming to the store - double the number from about the same time last year, Beadle said.
And 26 million people bought items on Amazon.com over the last year. However, that company has lost money nearly every quarter since it went public in 1997. Net loss for the third quarter that ended Sept. 30 was $35.1 million.
So why are shoppers turning to the Internet?
Convenience.
