Filling the void in official statistics for online spending, the US Commerce Department said on Friday it is creating an annual index to track Net commerce.
The e-commerce numbers will be included in the department's annual retail survey -- the definitive set of sales data for the retailing industry.
"As e-tailing takes off, retailers, manufacturers, and investors will have a need for ever more accurate statistics," Secretary of Commerce William M. Daley said in a conference Friday morning in Washington. Until now, the department has included online shopping figures with catalog sales in its retail sales reports.
Daley estimated that online retailing revenues would triple between 1998 and 2000 to become a US$30 billion-a-year industry -- and one that needs some government-level numbers-crunching.
Estimates of total US online sales in 1998 range from US$7.4 billion to $13 billion, Daley said in his speech, which cited statistics by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Forrester Research, and other market-research firms.
Part of the reason for the wide spread in the stats is that researchers don't always survey the same kinds of transactions, like stock purchases or sales that are researched online but may be purchased offline.
As a result, retailers have been confused about e-commerce prospects, said Pamela Rucker, a spokesperson for the National Retail Federation.
"The various surveys might be looking at apples and oranges," she said. "Really the only entity that has the wherewithal to accurately gage how big it is is the federal government."
So far, researcher methods have varied widely, as have their e-commerce projections. Forrester Research, for example, which projected $7.8 billion in 1998 online sales, based its figures on a survey of 100 mostly large or mid-sized Net retailers. Others, like Jupiter Communications added shopper surveys or company filings to the research-methodology mix.
Daley used an average of researchers' figures to estimate that Americans spent about $3 billion in 1997 and $9 billion in 1998. But the official online sales numbers for this year and last won't be available until mid-2000 -- a long time considering the hyper-fast growth of the Net commerce industry.
The leap from 1997 to 1998 represented less than 1 percent of total retail sales, "but can you imagine if the rest of the economy tripled every year?" Daley asked.
With the number of retailers going online growing each year, Daley also noted that there are some "very important policy concerns to keep the Internet revolution on track."
Flanked by Robert Pitofsky, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Daley called on Web retailers to police themselves and noted that before purchasing anything online, buyers should be aware of keeping their password private and checking to see if the company has a policy about how it uses personal data.
Reuters contributed to this report.
