According to OIA, on-line retail sales growth in the outdoor industry is out-pacing brick & mortar sales growth by more than a two to one margin. With the holiday selling season ramping up, e-commerce outdoor retailers are seeing some fundamental shifts in the buying patterns with “Cyber Monday” stretching out to include the entire preceding weekend. At the same time, the on-line retail environment is becoming much more competitive.

Much of the shift in shopping patterns and timing is being caused by the fact that a much larger percentage of the U.S. population has high-speed internet access at home. According to the Pew Internet Research Project, at the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, up from 30% in March 2005, or a 40% increase.

Robert Wolfe, founder of Moosejaw and Moosejaw.com is seeing this trend play out with more consistent web-traffic through the holiday season. “Like most retailers, we’ve planned our entire year around this five week period… I checked our sales yesterday and we were up 70% for the year,” Wolfe said. “Our sales have been pretty consistent Thursday through Monday. I don’t think there has been a big spike on Black Friday or on Monday. We’re just jammed all of the time.”

Mark McKnight, who heads up marketing for Rock/Creek Outfitters in Chattanooga, is seeing much of the same. “We were up slightly, not considerably, for the actual Monday period,” he said. “From Saturday through this week there has been a gentle upward trend. I think some people are waiting and focusing less on Monday.”

While some of this shift in spending patterns can be credited to the proliferation of broadband access at home, many retailers are actively trying to smooth out their sales spikes during the holiday season. Mike Foley, a spokesperson for REI told BOSS that they have been running promotions designed to divert consumer spending to earlier in the fall season.

“Cyber Monday was more of a phenomenon three or four years ago and every year since then it has become less significant as more people get high speed connections at home and our promos prompt them to shop earlier in the season,” said Mike Foley, spokesperson for REI. “Sales are also growing as the season progresses. The following two Mondays after Cyber Monday get bigger.”

Foley went on to say that REI’s on-line sales were up 23% on Cyber Monday, and month-to-date, they are up 25%.
This is not to say that the Monday after thanksgiving has lost its importance to on-line retailers all together. Many still feel that, without promotional events to draw traffic to a different day, it is still the official start to the on-line spending season.

“Cyber Monday was a record day. And the day after was a record too. We were pretty excited to see Tuesday even stronger than Monday and the week before,” said Bryce Phillips, founder of evo and the website evogear.com. “The site itself is up triple from last year in straight revenue numbers. Its running that much better, we’ve merchandised it that much better.”

Dustin Robertson, VP of marketing at Backcountry.com agrees. “Cyber Monday is still the kick-off. This year it still was the biggest day we had up to that point, and then we expect it to grow every Monday following up until about a week before Christmas,” he said. “There was one significant change this year. Black Friday, in all previous years it had never spilled over onto the web. It was pretty much just a brick & mortar phenomenon. This year it did spill over, but you had to have some crazy deals going and play into that angle of it. A lot of the brick & mortar guys had a pretty cohesive on-line merchandising plan around Black Friday.”

Backcountry.com is seeing a very strong holiday shopping season, with sales for the period-to-date increasing in the mid-60% range. Robertson said that they are still on-track to hit their goals of 70%-80% sales growth for the 2006 fiscal year.

Universally, on-line retailers are seeing the competitive environment heat up this year. For the most part, outdoor and SnowSports retailers are avoiding big sales and instead opting for shipping incentives or free gifts.

“I think it’s getting a lot more competitive on price, which is not the best possible trend for us,” McKnight said. “We just launched our free shipping over $49, it used to be $79, and that’s just to bring us in line with what everyone else is doing. We’re seeing a lot more sales and a lot more coupons out there. On things like Denalis and other very competitive items, you’ll see all kinds of random offers, like free music downloads.”

Wolfe agrees. “We do a lot of gift with purchase incentives. Now is not the time to be doing a 20% off sale. Closer to the holidays we do expedited shipping incentives, but I think that you need to do that nowadays just to stay in the game.”

“This is generally not the time of the year for us to discount,” said Robertson. “Most of the vendors don’t want to see the discounts right now, and that’s usually the way we’ve played it. But this year, for whatever reason, there’s been a ton of it. Some of the big guys are really pounding it.”

Without an exception, TNF’s Denali and Khumbu jackets are the hot sellers for outdoor and SnowSports on-line retailers this winter. Several retailers also called-out Arc’Teryx, Patagonia, Mountain Hardwear, Burton, Crocs, Ugg, and Volcom as strong brands for the holiday season. In hardgoods Burton, Volkl, and K2 are reportedly selling-through as well.

With on-line retailers getting stronger each year, and accounting for a larger percentage of sales, the changing buying patterns of this consumer become more important to the industry. At the same time, many brick & mortar retailers are finding new ways to add on to their customer base with e-commerce sites and integrated marketing campaigns that use electronic, print, and grassroots marketing to speak to their customers in a new way.