While the end of the world may easily be near, depending on who you want to believe, the most recent results are slightly positive for the time being.

According to the latest Comscore finding this past Cyber Monday was the second highest online spending day since the beginning of time, with $846 million spent.

It wasn’t quite enough to bring the period up from November 1st to December 1st into positive growth territory, but did overcome the pre-Thanksigiving numbers which saw a decrease of 4% year over year for the period to a decline of just 2%.

What does the future bode for online retailers then?

Comscore forecasts that online spending will be exactly what it was a year ago, at $29.2 billion for the November and December months, an average of $14.6 billion per month–compared to an average of $10.2 billion a month from January to October.

Not exactly the greatest news if you’re an online retailer, but far from the end of the world, as we know it.

November has come and gone and we’re in the final stretch of Q4 toward Christmas which historically has seen major increases in sales, both online and offline.

Will the trend continue this year in making it a season to remember, or will the ghosts of Christmas future haunt online retailers?

Well, it depends on who you ask.

Looking at the glass half empty, the first part of November looks quite gloom, per the New York Times :

During the first 23 days of November, according to a report to be released later on Tuesday by the research firm comScore, consumers spent $8.19 billion online, a 4 percent drop from the same period last year. That marks the first annual decline since e-commerce took off.

Post November 23 though, things seem much more auspicious now per USA Today:

…online visits to Web tracker Akamai Technologies’ approximately 280 retail customer sites topped last Cyber Monday’s peak of 4.6 million visitors per minute. By 3 p.m. Akamai’s global retail customers — which include Best Buy and Victoria’s Secret — were experiencing 6.7 million online visitors per minute — the most Akamai has seen since it started collecting the data in 2005.

Whether or not the spike in traffic has resulted in a proportional increase in sales remains to be seen, but certainly it’s a good trend to be a part of.

Further reports show that despite a slow overall November, sales on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday have actually increased year over year:

Internet research firm ComScore said on Sunday that online spending was up only 2 percent on Thanksgiving Day and Friday combined, compared with a year ago.

PayPal, the online payment service owned by San Jose-based eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), said Black Friday transactions were up nearly 34 percent compared with 2007.

Another research firm, ShopperTrak RCT tracks total retail sales at more than 50,000 stores, said sales were up 3 percent to $10.6 billion on Black Friday compared to a year ago.

So there may be hope after all as we exit a poor November and enter into the final month of 2008, with the spirit of the season coming around, consumers may just not be able to help themselves from spending money.

The JP Morgan Internet Team has released a survey that suggests things may not be as gloomy as some might have you expect.

And while others may focus more on the gloom of things, we like to take a more glass half-full approach to the holiday season.

The results of the study are as follows:

Among those who shop online, the following percentage of shoppers are going to spend:

Discounting any other variables would indicate that this X-mas season is going to be roughly the same for online shoppers as compared to last year

Of course, it’s impossible to tell by how much the surveyors will either increase or decrease in spend, but given the potential negative growth in overall spend in Q4, one can assume that the overall decrease may offset any potential spending increase in spend among shoppers.

Still, one has to be hopeful that a slightly greater amount of people will be choosing to spend more money online this year.

Which, given the state of the economy, may stem a great part due to people getting tired of the malls and the dangers that come with them, and would rather shop with a click of their mouse instead.

Comscore has released e-commerce growth numbers for the start of Q4 October, which shows that growth has slowed to an anorexic 1% during the past month compared to last October.

Source: TechFlash.com

While this may seem to some to be a doom, gloom, jump off the bridge type of scenario, the silver lining here is that there was still growth year over year during the past month.

In other words, the online retail market is outperforming itself today compared to one year ago. If we were to survey online merchants and asked them how they thought online retail had done last month, many would think it would have been down from last year.

Historically of course, the Q4 shopping season is usually much more profitable for most retailers, with certain merchants getting 200-300%+ more sales compared to other, slower times of the year.

So for last month’s October to have been higher than they have in the history of e-commerce is a sign that consumers have simply not given up purchasing things online.

On the other side of the coin of course, such stagnant growth is certainly not an ideal scenario for merchants selling online, as they would like to see growth in overall consumer spend relative to the growth in online retailers.

The 1% growth is most likely due to more retailers flooding the online world giving conusmers more options, rather than consumers spending more money on any individual site–so at such minute growth one can conclude that more often than not, individual retailers are actually losing revenue since the pie has suddenly been divided into more pieces, while remaining the same size.

It will be very interesting to see how the rest of the quarter/year plays out, for if the trend continues we may see actually see a decline in the November/December months.

Still, a slight drop in sales during the winter season will still likely result in the most profitable quarter of the year for most retailers by a fair margin.

With word out on the street that search giant Google is struggling since their main revenue stream, namely paid search/display ads (a.k.a. Adwords) has been strongly downtrodden as of late.

A Citigroup analyst, Mark Mahaney goes as far to state that we’re in the “worst economic environment in our collective lifetimes”, and that “search marketers almost universally expect this Q4 to be the weakest they have ever experienced.”

With Google being an industry leader it would be sensible to expect that their struggles will trickle down toward other parts of the web, which we’ve seen to be the case with numerous dot com giants laying off employees left and right.

However as the rest of the industry seems to be struggling, comparison shopping at the moment appears to remain nearly recession proof relative to other industries, both anecdotedly and analytically.

Over the next few posts we’ll analyze the differences between the two and why this is the case.

Using numbers from Spyfu as an indicator of what industry spend is on SEM (search engine marketing), the biggest ad buyers in the previous month are as follows (comparison shopping engines are bolded):

We can see that 6 of the top 10 ad buyers, 10 of the top 20, and in total 17 of the top 100 are all comparison shopping engines. Historically this has generally been the case, and to see this trend continuing is a promising sign that the CSE’s are remaining strong. In total, the shopping engines account for 36% of the ads bought among the top 100 ad buyers.

The more telling factor though comes in Spyfu’s list of top budget changes on advertising. The old adage “the bigger they are the harder they fall” certainly applies here–as one would expect that in the “worst economic environment in our collective lifetimes” that in a time when advertising spend is going to reduced across the board, that it’d be the largest spenders that will have to reduce costs the most.

And a quick glance at both lists we can see that this is true–for the most part.

Of the top 20 ad buyers, we can see that seven of them are also among the top 100 with the biggest cuts in their budget, including Amazon, eBay, Target, AOL, and Google–however, only one shopping engine, namely NexTag is among one of the biggest budget reducers.

Extrapolating even further then, if we look at all 100 of the top ad buyers that Spyfu has listed, 24 sites appear on both lists, but again Nextag remains the lone shopping engine, of the 17 total shopping engines listed as a top 100 ad buyer, that have felt the need to significantly reduce their budgets.

This is telling in a few ways–that first of all, the engines are still generating enough revenue in order to continue being some of the top ad buyers, and that secondly the shopping engines are still performing and converting well enough for them to continue to justify their high spend levels in a time when conversion is down in the other industries.

Certainly we’re not suggesting that comparison shopping is completely recession proof (is anything?), but that the nature of its business makes it moreso as compared to the rest of the industry, leaving us confident that no matter the situation, the shopping engines will continue to have a significant presence on the web.

In the next few parts of our series, we will examine why this is the case.

Google is once again at it, with a new feature that has been standard for a while now on the other major comparison shopping engines.

They’ve just announced on their blog that they’ve unveiled a new taxonomy system for merchants to categorize their products under.

It will be interesting to see how this affects how a merchant performs with this new system, as Google Shopping differs mainly from all the other engines in that it lacks the ability to browse for items. For instance if you go to either NexTag or Pricegrabber you automatically have categories to browse through from the home page–while Google Shopping lacks this feature, and the Google Base homepage is severely limited.

What it can help though is after a search is performed, potential customers will have the option, as on the other engines, to simply browse through the categories that relates to the search.

However, this is possible at the moment only because the other engines more or less enforce products into categorization–while products that remain uncategorized (or categorized incorrectly) suffer from a lack of exposure.

Since Google Base/Shopping is still a free to use engine, it will be interesting to see how heavily this will be enforced upon its users–since merchants are more likely to ignore what’s going on with their Google campaigns, and since categorization can be highly tedious work. Not to mention that Google mentions that using their taxonomy is simply “recommended”, and that merchants are “free” to use their own taxonomy systems.

For now it seems like the taxonomy system will mainly help in terms of search relevancy–meaning a merchant may rank higher if a search phrase matches what is in his “product types” header.

Either way it certainly is a step in right direction for Google, and gives merchants one more way to separate themselves from the others and increase their relevancy.

You can download the complete system, with 2,570 sub categories in total, here.

Unlike Shopping.com’s announcement to lower CPC rates within certain categories, Pricegrabber has announced that they will apply a 25% CPC increase across the board for all of their categories.

Just in time for the shopping season, the rates will be effective starting in November, and will run until January 15, 2009 (can anyone else believe 2009 is right around the corner?)

What do you as a merchant have to do to prepare for such a change?

Well according to Pricegrabber, thankfully this change will “take place on November 1st without any required action on your part”–in theory.

But in actuality this change will require merchants to more closely monitor their campaigns in order to make sure their spend doesn’t go completely out of control–combining the natural traffic spikes with the holiday season around the corner, as well as the rates increase may make it a not so happy holiday season.

Given all the recent economical news lately then, this may be one type of change that you may not be able to afford.

On the bright side of things however, the spikes in traffic should naturally transition into greater revenue numbers, which, through proper campaign management (or perhaps through the services of a management company ), it may turn out to be a very Merry Xmas after all.

So NexTag didn’t quite follow on Shopping.com’s lead of reducing CPC rates, but instead have done the typical raising of rates, along with adding the following new categories for Q4:

• Electronics / GPS Devices
• Electronics / Accessories
• Gifts / Gift Cards

GPS’s have been the hot products over the past year since prices have dropped considerably on them–it wasn’t too long ago that standalone systems were in the thousands of dollars range–and other than the what’s been going on in the economy lately, there’s little reason to think they won’t continue to be a hot gift choice.