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Monday August 6, 4:35 pm Eastern Time, TheStandard.com

By PC World

The chips may be down for dot coms, but online shopping looks a lot like a winning hand. While the stock market fell and the economy faltered, online spending lept to $5.3 billion in June, a 71 percent jump from the previous year, according to a pair of national researchers.

Offline spending generated by online shopping rose to nearly $5.5 billion, according to research from Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. and Harris Interactive Inc.

The biggest brick-and-mortar retailers in the country--Walmart, JCPenney, Kmart, Target, and Sears--used their easily recognized brand

names to drive double-digit and higher traffic increases to their Web sites. "Many people thought these people were dying, but contrary to those concerns, these guys appear to be doing quite well," says Sean Kaldor, vice president of analytical services and principal analyst for e-commerce at Nielsen/NetRatings. "Some recently consolidated sites [Walmart and Kmart] seem to be doing better than the others."

Bricks and clicks

Walmart led all offline retailers with 2 million online visitors in June. That was a whopping 133 percent increase from the same month last year. JCPenney was just a few clicks behind, with about 2 million visitors and a 34 percent jump from June 2000. Kmart stood in third place with nearly 1.7 million visitors, a 36 percent rise.

Target tallied the highest percentage growth among sites put up by brick-and-mortar retailers (142 percent), as traffic climbed to 1.6 million visitors. Sears was in fifth place, with a 23 percent growth rate that pushed its Web site traffic to 1.6 million visitors in June.

Research data cited by the two firms shows that the mass retailers' e-commerce revenue came from a broad range of product categories.

Among the top five merchants, clothing and apparel sales was the top revenue generator. Second on the list was home and garden, followed by toys, health and beauty, and video products.

The findings are drawn from polling of a Nielsen/NetRatings panel of 65,000 home Web surfers and a joint survey by Nielsen/NetRatings and Harris Interactive of 37,000 Web users. Amazon, AOL still dominate "Some of these [mass market retail] people said they are going to come in and take over the world, but Amazon is still the dominant force online," Kaldor says.

There wasn't a single mass-market retailer among the Top 10 most trafficked Internet sites in the United States, a category that's topped by

perennial front-runner AOL Time Warner. At Number 11, Amazon was the highest ranked big retailer, according to Nielsen/NetRatings' Top 25 Web properties statistics for the last week of July.

Tuesday August 7, 9:25 am Eastern Time

NEW YORK, Aug 7 (Reuters) - The pace of sales at U.S. retailers picked up during the four retail weeks in July compared with June as

seasonal clearance sales lured consumers to stores, a report said on Tuesday.

Instinet Research said its Redbook Retail Sales Average rose 1.9 percent during the four retail weeks ended Aug. 4 over the same period in June, ahead of the target for a 1.5 percent increase. Sales rose 1.6 percent during the first three retail weeks of July.

On a year-over-year basis, sales rose 2.5 percent compared with a target 2.1 percent gain and a 1.9 percent rise during the first two weeks.

Results for the last week of July were mixed, with discount stores reporting healthy sales but department stores ``expressing

disappointment,'' Redbook said.

Discount store sales were led by food and pharmacy items rather than apparel, while retailers sought to transition their inventories into the fall season, the report said. Some retailers had started to notice ``consumer demand for fall-related (including back-to-school) merchandise.''

The Redbook Retail Sales Average is a sales-weighted average of annual growth in same-store sales at discount, department and chain stores that report their results on a weekly basis.

The average is compiled from a sample of general merchandise retailers representing about 9,000 stores. Same store sales measure revenues at stores open at least a year.

The Redbook Average is released weekly by Instinet Research, a division of Instinet, a Reuters-owned electronic brokerage.