NEWS ROUND 1999-07-26

Denise Power

NRF, Forrester in On-Line Effort

WASHINGTON -- The National Retail Federation here and Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass., will collaborate on a project to track on-line retail trends, including sales and traffic, on a quarterly basis. The first batch of results contained in the NRF/Forrester Online Retail Index will be made available in early October to companies that agree to share their information.

The goal is to capture on-line sales data from more than 75 of the Top 100 retailers -- brick-and-mortar retailers, catalog-retailer hybrids and pure-play Internet retailers. On-line sales data will be reported by product category rather than store format to facilitate comparison across categories. "For the first time our members will be able to get consistent data by product category on the state of the on-line market," said, Tracy Mullin, NRF president. NRF and Forrester are currently recruiting retailers to share second-quarter sales results to be incorporated into a beta version of the Online Retail Index. Scott Silverman, NRF director, Internet retailing, said once a minimum of six retailers within a class of trade have agreed to share their data, it will be compiled, analyzed and shared with participating companies in aggregated form.