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Shoppers are crowding malls but that doesn’t mean cash registers are filling up.
A prominent research firm lowered its forecast for holiday retail sales yesterday, despite the fact that it expects traffic at stores to increase for the first time in four years.
Retail sales for the crucial November-December period are on track to rise 2.5 percent, according to ShopperTrak, a Chicago-based retail consulting firm.
That’s down from a September forecast for a 3.3-percent increase, said Chris Angell, the firm’s director of global marketing.
Disruptions from Hurricane Sandy are partly to blame for the expected revenue shortfall.
In addition to temporary store closings, retailers have been hit by markdowns they’ve been forced to take to clear a backlog of fall merchandise.
At the same time, however, store traffic is on track to rise 2.8 percent — the first jump in holiday traffic since 2008, according to ShopperTrak.
The disparity is partly because consumers are window-shopping, according to Angell, and it’s possible that distractions such as the fiscal cliff faced by Congress are at work.
But industry watchers say shoppers are “showrooming” — the practice of browsing products at retail stores before buying them at lower prices online.
“There are big discussions on how many people are window-shopping and how does that translate to online sales,” Angell said.
Indeed, during the Black Friday weekend that kicked off the holiday-shopping season, a surge in the use of mobile and tablet devices appeared to be driven by showrooming, according to Mark Layton, chief executive of e-commerce site designer PFSweb.
“[Showrooming] looked strong on Black Friday in particular, with a lot of people using mobile devices at store locations,” Layton said.