Time flies. It seems like just a couple of years ago, retailers were devising every possible strategy to provide incentives for their customers to take their shopping online during the holidays. This year, we're seeing postings like this one about sites as highly-trafficked as WalMart.com, Amazon.com and Macy's.com (pre-planned failure page pictured to the right) failing to handle Black Friday traffic surges.

Now, as ecommerce is proving its ability to reach unprecedented revenues of over $600,000,000 in one day, will Internet infrastructure management rise to the occasion? Some say that Cyber Monday won't even be this season's busiest day of ecommerce. CyberSource, a market intelligence firm who has tracked data for the past few years, expects December 18th to be this year's peak. (Well, at least in the United States. A leading Canadian retailer explained to me a couple of weeks ago that distribution channels are a bit less speedy up there, so their busiest day is generally a few days before ours.)

Perhaps multi-channel management will be the name of the 2007 game. Some interesting cross-channel strategies have been implemented this year. Best Buy and CompUSA announced dedicated parking spaces (a la "Chili's To Go") for online shoppers who would rather pick up their items at their local store. Another article showed how some retailers have taken a more gender-specific channel strategy by staging their stores with female shoppers in mind while trying to focus on online male shoppers. However, some retailers are not yet grasping the channel management concept. My wife came home from the mall on Sunday with a coupon from a particular retailer who was giving shoppers a discount for further purchases made before December 25th. Great idea, but the coupon is only redeemable in the store and not on their Web site. 

So, is one channel better than another? I guess it depends on your preferences. I love ecommerce...if I never set foot in another store again, I'll be a happy shopper. But, as long as the Internet has less tangibility than its physical channel counterpart, I think we'll continue to see offline sales trump online sales.