Holiday mania.com: e-commerce still a tiny part of retail.

The gift-buying frenzy is over and the receipts have been tallied. And the winner is online shopping, right?

Not necessarily.

"This is the year that e-commerce came of age, moving from an experiment to an established phenomenon," said David Pecaut, head of the Boston Consulting Group's global e-commerce practice. "But e-commerce is still a small part - less than 1 percent - of the retailing market overall."

So while e-commerce companies - several of them locally based - enjoyed a truly wild ride this shopping season, it was the traditional brick-and-mortar retailers that reaped the lion's share of business.

Without question, the face of retailing is changing, but the competition for consumer dollars is far from over. Retailers know they need to change tactics to keep their stores full of paying customers - just as online retailers know they need to work to market and manage their businesses.

For the weeks before Christmas, e-commerce revenue grew by an astounding 230 percent over last year's level, according to a study released last week by Boston Consulting Group. The strong holiday sales are expected to push 1998's online retail total over the $13 billion mark. Meanwhile, research company Media Metrix reported that at least 40.2 million "unique visitors" (different users) hit the Internet during the week of Nov. 30 alone.

Analysts were quick to emphasize how miniscule online sales are in the bigger picture. Although final holiday sales figures won't be released until mid-January, analysts predict a 5 percent to 6 percent jump in sales over 1997.

Several local retailers said that they hit expectations and even went a little over, although none would release figures. Bloomingdale's at the Century City Shopping Center & Marketplace reported it was beating projections, as did Mervyn's at the Glendale Galleria. The Nordstrom stores in Southern California were doing a brisk business with increased sales in designer fragrances and cashmere sweaters, and discount retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target helped ensure healthy sales with sizable markdowns.

"The last two weeks of the season were extremely busy. We're expecting a high double-digit increase over last year," said Toni Bayley, executive team leader at Target's Culver City store.

For its part, Century City Shopping Center & Marketplace is expecting to register up to 6 percent in total sales over last year. Good weather and an influx of tourists from Wisconsin to attend the Rose Bowl this year helped boost sales.

But even retailers enjoying a good year acknowledged the need to either establish or expand their online presence.

"It does concern me that my store may lose traffic," said Tina Borkowski, Crate & Barrel store manager in Century City. "People ask us all the time (about a Web site) to be able to view our merchandise and plan ahead. Our site should be up next year."

While online sales currently only constitute 1 percent of total retail revenues, "I can see it go significantly higher," said John Golisch, retail partner at the downtown office of Arthur Andersen LLP. "It can go to the 10 to 20 percent range and even higher, depending on the type of merchandise, in the next three to five years."

For those retailers already doing business online, the season has been downright frantic.

Hollywood-based DVD Express, an online retailer of DVD movies, was so swamped that its executives spent time in the warehouse packing shipments. Susan Daniher, the company's vice president of marketing, said 20,000 orders were received per week in the period before Christmas. The company was expecting an even higher level of orders last week due to the large number of DVD players given as gifts this year.

The holiday surge led DVD Express to exceed its December revenue goal by $1 million, bringing 1998 revenues to $17 million.

"Next year, we'll be better prepared," Daniher said. "Not just for the packing, but also for consumer (buying) patterns."

In Santa Monica, Cooking.com, an online seller of gourmet food products and kitchenware, easily met its goals for its first holiday season.

"It was a good year," said Chief Executive David Hodess. "We saw a big rise in orders the day after Thanksgiving that continued up to the holidays. It definitely stretched our reserves."

Also in Santa Monica, Anthony Mazzarella, chief executive of IMall Inc., said tenants in his company's virtual mall saw their collective revenues quadruple this holiday season, compared with the year-ago period.

"Not only did our clients see more buyers, the buyers purchased more merchandise," Mazzarella said. "We saw a fundamental change of the buyers' behavior this year."

Despite that much-heralded change in consumer behavior, retailing is not facing a complete changing of the guard. Instead, it's undergoing a transformation, in which traditional retailers will need to protect their bottom lines.

One strategy is to follow the "if you can't beat them, join them" adage and get online, as Crate & Barrel's Borkowski pointed out. Several major retailers have already done so, most notably The Gap, Barnes & Nobles, Macy's and Bloomingdale's. While pure online retailers, such as Amazon.com, have garnered the most attention from media and Wall Street, traditional chains (with brick-and-mortar locations) account for half of the $13 billion in 1998 e-commerce sales, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

"To some extent, online retailing is more analogous to the catalog industry in that it cannibalizes its physical stores' performance," said Nicole Vanderbilt, director of digital commerce research at Jupiter Communications. "That money is being redirected rather than lost by retailers."

Traditional retailers also are being pressured to upgrade their physical stores into more entertaining environments, to offset the competitive advantage of the Net's greater convenience.

"We're being defensive about change and the Internet," said Rick Caruso, president of Caruso Affiliated Holdings, a Santa Monica-based retail developer. "We're creating developments that have nicer environments to enhance the shopping experience. We're including a wide variety of stores. The face of retail is always changing."

Caruso's latest center, The Commons at Calabasas, is an example of the newest wave of premier shopping experiences. The 200,000-square-foot, $40 million development - complete with a Mediterranean landscape, cobblestone courtyards and elaborate limestone statues - opened in November. It had a strong showing for its first season, Caruso said, with several chain stores having record openings.

For certain types of products, most shoppers will always prefer the visceral experience of in-person shopping.

"Shopping is more than an economic experience for people - it's entertainment, it's social," said Barry Parr, director of e-commerce strategies at technology research firm International Data Corp. "It's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the Internet will hurt the apparel retailer anytime soon."

Many bargain hunters also seem to prefer the traditional, hands-on approach.

"I like to shop for bargains - that takes a lot of hunting and searching that I'm not sure is feasible on the Internet," said Santa Monica resident J.T. Rapport, sifting through Macy's discount racks at the Santa Monica Place mall. "I like to take advantage of good sales."