A year after the 1999 holiday season proved to analysts that pure-play retailers were the wave of the future, Christmas 2000 has knocked the stuffing out of the very concept of being an internet-only retailer.
   Even as traffic to retail web sites rose impressively during the holidays in 2000 compared to the previous year, the net’s leading pure-play retailers lost serious ground.
   What pure-plays remain reasonably vibrant on the web are those that are not strictly speaking retailers but offer services related to retailing, such as sites offering reward programs for shoppers or comparison shopping sites.
    Buy.com and eToys, the Nos. 4 and 5 web retailers in 1999, dropped to Nos. 9 and 10 in 2000, according to new data from Media Metrix. Both actually lost visitors in 2000, even though overall traffic to web retail sites increased 30.3 percent between 1999 and 2000.
   Another leading web retailer, CDNow, saw a 15 percent increase in traffic comparing the 1999 and 2000 holiday seasons. But this was still a lower rate than the 18.6 percent increase in traffic experienced by the entire web over that same time frame.
    Amazon.com remained the leading net retailer but it is no longer a pure-play because of its joint arrangement with Toysrus.com.
    Media Metrix notes that Amazon.com experienced a 48 percent increase in holiday traffic in 2000 over 1999, but if one adds in the 1999 figure from Toysrus.com, that becomes only a 16 percent increase. If Toysrus.com traffic was up in 2000, then traffic to the rest of Amazon.com went up even less.
    There were three pure-plays among the list of top retail sites during the 2000 holiday shopping season whose traffic did increase significantly from 1999.
   But two of them—Mypoints.com and Bizrate.com—are not retailers but are incentive sites, offering bonuses for frequent web shoppers.
   And the other, Half.com, is a seller of used items and so not the sort of retailer normally considered when it comes to illustrating consumer activity during the holidays.
    By contrast, offline retailers appeared to have a good year, led by the biggest offline retailer of all, Wal-Mart.
   Once ridiculed for its slow start on the internet, Wal-Mart became the biggest gaining retail site on the web during the 2000 Christmas season.
   Traffic to Walmart.com was up 640 percent in 2000 compared to holiday traffic in 1999.
    This happened despite some well-publicized setbacks, including the fact that Wal-Mart shut the entire site down for a couple of weeks in the beginning of October for a redesign. The site also experienced a series of blackout-causing glitches in early December.
   Media Metrix reports further that six of the 10 top-gaining retail sites during the holiday season in 2000 were sites associated with offline brands—besides Walmart.com they were Bestbuy.com, AmericanGreetings.com, Staples.com, Hallmark.com and Sears.com.
   It should be noted that two of these are not retail sites but greeting-card sites.
   Of the other four fast-growing sites during Christmas 2000, two are comparison shopping sites—Dealtime.com and Mysimon.com, and one— Bizrate.com—is an incentive site.
    Only one—800.com—was an actual pure-play e-tailer. 800.com sells consumer electronics online.
   How things have changed. Said one analyst in advance of the 1999 Christmas season" "The pure-play e-tailers are really going to knock the cover off the ball this Christmas" 
    One year later, it looks like these retailers are left holding the cover. The offline retailers have the rest of the ball, and it looks like it’s going to be their game from now on.

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media.

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