Amazon and eBay's Dominance of Web Shopping Begins to Fade

[mandy]

More people than ever are expected to shop online this holiday season, but Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. are no longer the clear winners.

The dominance of the two e-commerce giants is being chipped away by a new breed of online shopper drawn to familiar names and lower prices, better Internet-search technology and an explosion in the number of merchants competing on the Web. Some of the biggest beneficiaries of these changes are brick-and-mortar retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp...

“What we've seen is that the demographics of shopping online have begun to more closely mirror America in general,” says Raul Vazquez, chief marketing officer at Walmart.com.

As traditional retailers have ramped up their online operations, the percentage of e-commerce spending that goes to Web-only retailers has declined to 52 percent so far this year, down from 55 percent in 2005 and 60 percent in 2004...

full article: http://www.readingeagle.com/re/business/1595884.asp