Forrester’s US Online Retail Forecast, 2010 To 2015, launches today, reporting strong growth in the last year. “The Great Recession” appears to have ended as sales charge ahead, driven by ubiquitous connectivity and an increasing familiarity with the Web. Growth was driven by a few key factors:

• Several million new web buyers. In 2010, 5.5 million shopped online for the first time.
• Greater spend per buyer online. 70% of the overall growth came from existing shoppers simply buying more.
• Online penetration of total retail sales. This rose to 8% during 2010.

According to our forecast, the web channel will grow steadily through 2015, with an emphasis on customer empowerment. Bricks-and-mortar stores will continue to be hampered by this web growth as people become more in tune with the Web and less interested in traffic and long lines. We’ll be continuing our online retail research with our long-standing partnership with Shop.org this year. Next up: The State of Retailing Online report in Q2.  If you’re an online retailer, contact me at smulpuru@forrester.com to participate in the survey and receive the report. 

 Want more details? US Online Retail Forecast, 2010 To 2015

Consider it an inauguration of sorts, a celebration of the eBook industry becoming a member of the major media club just as digital music and online video have before them. When you influence a billion dollars, people have to take you seriously. In the book business, it means that traditional publishers can no longer live in deny-and-delay mode; meanwhile, digital publishers get invited to better parties and people in other media businesses like TV and magazines look over and wonder if they could cut a slice of this new pie just for them.

To honor the occasion, we have just published our five-year forecast for eBooks in the US for Forrester clients. The punchline is this: 2010 will end with $966 million in eBooks sold to consumers. By 2015, the industry will have nearly tripled to almost $3 billion, a point at which the industry will be forever altered.

Right now, the number to track – and the one that determines how many eBooks will sell – is the percent of a consumer’s books that are bought and consumed digitally. To get at this number, we have to understand how people get books today. Did you know that the two most common ways people get books today is borrowing them from a friend or getting them from the library? Evidently content – at least in the book business – is already quite free, even without the help of digital.

At The Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference in June, Apple CEO Steve Jobs compared the PC to a farm truck, saying that when America was an agrarian economy: “All cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm. Now trucks are one in 25 to 30 vehicles sold.” Whether you think PCs will shrink or grow in importance seems to depend partly on semantics. During the same conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer countered: “I think people are going to be using PCs in greater and greater numbers for years to come. . . . The PC as we know it will continue to morph form factor. The real question is, what are you going to push.” 

Jobs may not view the iPad as a PC, but we do.

Our view is that the consumer PC market in the US is indeed getting bigger: Over the next five years, PC unit sales across all form factors will increase by 52%. In fact, desktops are the only type of PC whose numbers will be fewer in 2015 than they are today — and even desktops will benefit from innovation in gaming and 3D. We detail our findings in a new report, The US Consumer PC Market In 2015. Clients can read the full report on our Web site, but here are a few key takeaways: