If analysts' projections are correct, online sales may bring some extra holiday cheer to retailers this year. Gartner projects fourth-quarter online sales will reach nearly $11.9 billion in North America--a 30% increase over last year. Forrester is gazing into a similar crystal ball, forecasting $11 billion in North American online sales for the holiday season.

BizRate.com has seen a surge in online purchases since Sept. 11. The comparison-shopping site, which aggregates more than 2,000 retailers, had $574 million in sales from Sept. 4 to Sept. 10. By the week of Oct. 9, that figure grew 32% to $756 million--a 51% increase over the same period last year. Chuck Davis, president and CEO of BizRate, says many people are spending more time at home and less time in malls these days, leading to an E-commerce uptick. "All of our merchants that we've talked to say their retail store sales are off, but their online sales are strong," says Davis.

Not everyone believes Americans are more inclined to be homebodies now. Gartner analyst David Schehr attributes the projected growth in E-commerce to a 23% increase in the online-shopping population over last year--by mid-2001, more than 71 million adults purchased something online, according to Gartner. Last year's online shoppers won't change their behavior much, says Schehr. He's basing that assessment on a Gartner survey of nearly 16,500 Americans, conducted between Sept. 26 and Oct. 7. The results: 80.5% plan to shop at the same rate this year, 6% will shop more, and 13.6% will shop less. "As horrific as the events of Sept. 11 were, consumers tend to try to go on with their daily lives. Buying holiday gifts is one way to feel like things are normal," Schehr says.

Land's End has already seen its online sales return to "typical levels," a spokeswoman says. The retailer is particularly keen on having a jolly holiday season, since 40% of its sales are generated between early November and late January. To that end, the Dodgeville, Wis., retailer worked with search-engine designer EasyAsk to launch a new natural-language search engine in August. Now when LandsEnd.com holiday shoppers want to find a red wool sweater for under $40, they can type that into the keyword field and get the results they really want. "Before, we found a lot of our customers had to refine their product searches two or three times before they found what they wanted," says a Land's End spokeswoman. "Now they can get the right results the first time around, and that's even more important as our site traffic increases around the holidays."