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Santa was pretty good to Yahoo! Hong Kong, bringing the Web site three times its normal online sales during the gift-giving season.

'Our Christmas promotion last year was very successful,' said Alfred Tsoi, general manager of Yahoo! Hong Kong, of the series of shopping incentives from November 29 to December 19.

'The number of orders during the promotion tripled compared with the week before.'

Mr Tsoi declined to provide figures of the numbers of buyers. Yahoo! Hong Kong was launched on August 8, last year so he could not use comparisons for previous years.

Yahoo! Hong Kong, part of the world's second-largest Internet media company, tried several tactics to encourage shoppers to buy online.

The site linked with the region's only non-profit organisation for street teens - Youth Outreach.

A purchase during the promotion automatically triggered a HK$20 donation, half from Yahoo! Hong Kong and half from the merchant.

Yahoo! Hong Kong presented a cheque for HK$100,000 to Youth Outreach.

The division also gave shoppers free Yahoo! T-shirts from the parent company's various regions, and launched a campaign to help bridge the gap in technological know-how by recruiting university students to teach computing skills to young people.

'It was the charity promotion and free T-shirts that triggered a lot of people to go shopping,' said Mr Tsoi.

He said the 23 merchants -  including clothing chain-store Giordano and photographic giant Kodak - found about 75 per cent of the shoppers had not previously bought anything from them, online or off.

The United States division of Yahoo! found that its holiday shopping order volume nearly doubled from the same period in 1999.

Excluding the US, Yahoo! said order volume increased sixfold around the world.

The most popular items in Hong Kong were books and compact discs, said Mr Tsoi.

The parent company said that overall, Asian shoppers were keen on Sony PlayStation products, mobile phones, toys featuring Hello Kitty and books about fictional boy wizard Harry Potter.

Mr Tsoi said that since the merchants handled their own delivery, there were no complaints about service - a common point of dissatisfaction among Internet shoppers.

A post-Christmas study by iamasia found that Hong Kong residents were quite dissatisfied with online shopping. In all, 75 per cent said they were unlikely to buy anything over the Web in the next year.

The measurement organisation also found that 25 per cent of respondents who had tried to shop over the Internet said they would not do it again. Just 5 per cent said they were satisfied.

Yahoo! surprised markets last week by predicting profits would fall by as much as 30 per cent this year, a stunning U-turn from analysts' predictions that it would gain 34 per cent.

The company blamed an anticipated slowdown in the overall US economy and devastation among dotcoms for its woes.

Yahoo!, one of the world's only profitable public Internet companies, will be more affected than the world's top Internet firm, America Online, because more of its revenues come from advertising from fellow Web companies.



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