* French online Christmas retail sales seen up 22 pct-Fevad
* PiXMania parcel shipments up 30 pct year-on-year
* RueDuCommerce trend good, but snow hampers deliveries
By Dominique Vidalon
PARIS, Dec 20 (Reuters) - French online retailers look set to benefit from the frost and snow keeping Christmas shoppers away from traditional stores, despite a risk the freezing weather could hamper deliveries.
PIXmania, DSG International's French online retail arm, said parcel shipments since the third week of November were up 30 percent year-on-year.
Europe's largest online retailer after Amazon.com is also banking on unique visitor traffic for December of 15-18 million for France alone against 12 million last year.
"The trend is rather good...Overall e-commerce is growing and the cold snap also helps," Ulric Jerome, Executive Director of PIXmania.com, told Reuters by phone.
Online retail sales are expected to increase by 22 percent in France this Christmas, with internet users spending 6.1 billion euros, the French Fevad e-commerce federation said.
Last week, French hypermarket group Auchan told Reuters that December sales could be hit after heavy snow led to store closures last week.
Europe's largest retailer Carrefour also said it had been "impacted" by the snow but gave no details.
PIXmania, which sells consumer and electronics online but has diversified into toys, books, household and sports equipment said electronic pet hamsters Zhu Zhu pets, Nintendo's Black Wii console, and Samsung's Galaxy Tab smartphone were at the top of its bestseller list.
French rival RueDuCommerce, which makes about 20 percent of annual revenue at Christmas, said the trend so far was "rather good" but it cautioned the bad weather was starting to hamper deliveries.
"Delivery delays may overall cancel the positive impact of the cold snap," said RueDuCommerce.com co-founder Patrick Jacquemin by phone.
RueDuCommerce was still guaranteeing Christmas deliveries through the Chronospost express service but no longer through La Poste's main service Colissimo because of the poor weather.
The snow had had no impact so far on PIXmania's deliveries.
"We are monitoring the state of weather conditions and of our deliveries by the hour. The weather is already improving and this trend should last until at least Thursday," Jerome said.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon)