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WIRED MAGAZINE | MARCH 1998 | NEW ECONOMY Watching the Predictors While we know that ecommerce keeps growing, by how much is anyone's guess. And analysts don't make matters any easier. Their estimates for United States online sales in 2000 differ by as much as US$61 billion, and not only that, their estimates of actual ecommerce revenues in 1996 don't mesh, either. Why the vast disparity? For starters, there's little consensus about what ecommerce measures. And each company uses a slightly different model to make its forecasts. Most conduct a survey: IDC talks to 40,000 Net users, Dataquest interviews 5,000 online shoppers, and Jupiter and Forrester question Web merchants. Revenues are then derived using a variety of methods that include guesstimating growth based on assessments of current Web-user behavior (IDC), contrasting numbers with secondary ecommerce research from ACNielsen and CommerceNet (Dataquest), comparing estimates with hard numbers gathered from major online retailers (Forrester), or projecting ecommerce growth as a portion of total online audience (Jupiter). The good news: all four research companies report underestimating their 1996 figures. The bad news: none have developed a way to forecast without resorting to old over-the-counter sales models, even though ecommerce obviously eliminates the counter.
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