During the first 27 days of November, total online retail spending reached $9.48 billion, or a 24 % increase versus the same period last year, the report said. In keeping with nearly all online retail sales trends over the last several years there is no immediately apparent ceiling to the growth.

The first week of December according to ComScore, saw the number of online buyers increase by 17% over a year ago, and the average amount spent per order increased 7%. Kurt Peters, editor in chief of Internet Retailer, says the growth is likely coming from more people shopping online as well as from experienced online shoppers increasing how much they spend. Peters says new buyers spend less than experienced buyers.

The single biggest sales day of the season last year was December 11th when shoppers spent $556 million dollars online. This was a significant increase from the year before. For the entire period, November 1 through December 12, online retail sales from were up 25% over 2005. Lat year total sales for the period were $12.47 billion, this year $15.58 billion.

ComScore’s report says Wednesday December 13th was likely the biggest online shopping day of the year with nearly $670 million in sales. This figure tops 2005′s No. 1 day by over $100 million. There have been 12 days this year were sales have surpassed $600 million.

“We keep seeing strong growth,” Scott Silverman, executive director of the National Retail Federation online division, shop.org was quoted in a Yahoo News story as saying. “It’s newsworthy when it continues, because each year you’re growing off a bigger base.”

Other studies performed during the run up towards the shopping season had predicted almost 40% of shoppers polled were planning to do more of their holiday purchasing online. It is clear that consumers are growing increasing confident in and dependant on Internet retail to meet their buying needs.

Among individual retailers the biggest winners were little changed from last year. Leading the pack of online retailers was Amazon.com with the largest sales during the studied period. Crossing the economic tape in second place was Dell.com. In descending order the remaining top ten holiday retailers were Yahoo.com, Wal-mart.com, JCPenny.com, Ticketmaster.com, Apple.com, Victoriassecret.com, Bestbuy.com, and Circuitcity.com.

While that list of names, all industry giants, might not be particularly thrilling to the small online retailer it is important to remember that old economic cliché, a rising tide lifts all boats. Smaller retail web sites have benefited as well. Consumer expectations of reliability and delivery times are rising along with their expenditures but retailers that meet these expectations will find their stockings stuffed with profits and can look forward to an even better year in 2007.
Art Micklewraith is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Top Ten Wholesale. He can be reached at Content and Solutions or by email at artmicklewraith@gmail.com

The courts determined that Google’s sale of GEICO trademarks as keywords was not unlawful. But GEICO established a likelihood of confusion with regard to those sponsored links that use GEICO’s trademarks in their headings or text. So the sale of GEICO as a keyword was lawful; but ads that included GEICO’s marks in their text were not. If the keyword GEICO triggered an ad without GEICO’s marks in its text, there would be no infringement.

In other circumstances an advertiser will include a rival company’s web address as a paid search term. For example, a company selling wholesale sunglasses might have a rival whose domain name is bettersunglasses.com. They then spend PPC monies to have their ad appear in the results for that domain name.

It is estimated that approximately 20% of all Internet searches are for trademarked terms such as urls or brand names. It should be kept in mind that most Internet users do not search by manufacturer or product name. Generally searches use broad terms that do not include a manufacturer’s name. This kind of search terms account for 70% of total searches and 60% of total conversions to web site visits.

The different PPC providers have differing policies regarding advertisers placing bids on trademarks belonging to other companies or entities. Below are the relevant texts taken directly from the terms of service for three of the biggest search and PPC providers, Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

From MSN;

Microsoft requires all advertisers to agree that they will not bid on keywords, or use in the text of their advertisements, any word whose use would infringe the trademark of any third party or would otherwise be unlawful or in violation of the rights of any third party.

From Yahoo Search Marketing;

On March 1, 2006, Yahoo Search Marketing will modify its editorial guidelines regarding the use of keywords containing trademarks. Previously, we allowed competitive advertising by allowing advertisers to bid on third-party trademarks if those advertisers offered detailed comparative information about the trademark owners’ products or services in comparison to the competitive products and services that were offered or promoted on the advertisers’ site.

In order to more easily deliver quality user experiences when users search on terms that are trademarks, Yahoo! Search Marketing has determined that we will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks.

From Google;

Our terms and conditions with advertisers prohibit intellectual property infringement by advertisers and make it clear that advertisers are responsible for the keywords they choose to generate advertisements and the text that they choose to use in those advertisements.

On the surface it looks as if all three search engines prohibit the use of trade marked phrases in a competing company’s keywords but it isn’t as simple as that. All three and especially Google place the onus of identifying trademark infringement on the victimized party and documenting these violations can be a time consuming and expensive chore. Most PPC provider have a dispute resolution system but want to avoid any overly direct connection with the trademark violation and so encourage the parties involved in a dispute to settle the problem between themselves but the if a company is willing to violate a copyright it is reasonable to assume that they might not work with their victim in straight forward and meaningful manner. Sometimes dealing with the violation even requires hiring of a third party to gather evidence if the trademark violation leads to a lawsuit.

In order to protect against trademark infringements an advertiser should conduct search audits at least once month. You not only need to look over organic search results, but also paid search results or PPC context ads.

Art Micklewraith is a freelance writer and regular contributor to Top Ten Wholesale. He can be reached at Content and Solutions or by email at artmicklewraith@gmail.com.