Online Influencing Offline

A new forecast adds further fuel to the local shopping fire (sorry). According to this article, Jupiter says:

The amount of money consumers spend online is expected to increase 75 percent by 2010, with the Internet influencing nearly half of all U.S. retail sales … U.S. consumers are expected to spend $144 billion in 2010 from $81 billion last year … Spending this year is expected to reach $95 billion.

comScore’s full 2005 e-commerce number was $82.7 billion. Yet total U.S. retail spending was more than $3.5 trillion in 2004.

Thus e-commerce is about 2.5% of total U.S. retail spending. But we agree with the thrust of the Jupiter prediction that the Internet will influence an increasingly large number of total transactions (the overwhelming majority of which will be local/offline in physical stores).