Digital Holiday Shopping Keeps Growing

As expected, growth in online shopping easily outpaced bricks-and-mortar increases during the 2012 holiday shopping season, according to industry trackers.E-tailing giant Amazon.com led the marketplace in terms of site visits on all the key shopping days: Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas, according to Experian, which tracks activity at the top 500 retailer sites (excluding mobile visits.Walmart, Target and Best Buy consistently held the second, third and fourth spots on those days, although fifth place varied: Sears on Thanksgiving, JCPenney on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and Macy's on Christmas. (A report from comScore Inc. instead put Apple in fifth on Black Friday.)Walmart followed closest behind Amazon.com on Thanksgiving Day, with 24.6 million visits compared with the e-tailer's 25.0 million. The gap later widened significantly, however, with Black Friday producing a difference of 18.4 million to 28.7 million and Cyber Monday a divide of 18.6 million to 35.0 million.In terms of overall sales, comScore reported that spending on Thanksgiving Day rose 32% to $633 million, while Black Friday's 26% gain raised sales to a little over $1.0 billion — the largest spend to date. "We continue to see [Black Friday] become more and more prominent in the e-commerce channel," comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a media release. "Coupled with early reports indicating that Black Friday sales in retail stores were down 1.8%, we can now confidently call it a multi-channel marketing phenomenon."Free shipping has become a powerful lure. According to ComScore, shoppers spend 42% more on average when free shipping is being offered, and spent 52% more during Black Friday week (ending Nov. 25). "Though retailers must often sacrifice margins when they provide free shipping, they benefit," Fulgoni said in a different release.Elsewhere, Cyber Monday online sales rose 17% to $1.5 billion to become the heaviest online spending day of the season, according to comScore. The next day's $1.3 billion in sales also outpaced the total for Cyber Monday in 2011.Despite those early record-setting totals, sales for the full holiday season rose only 14% to $42.3 billion, falling short of comScore's predictions. "While November started out at a very healthy 16% growth rate through ... [after] Cyber Monday, consumers almost immediately pulled back on spending — apparently due to concerns over the looming fiscal cliff and what that might mean for their household budgets in 2013," Fulgoni said. "While growth in the mid-teens for the season is still very encouraging — and certainly many times better than brick-and-mortar — it was perhaps a slightly disappointing result given the initial expectations."

P2PI MEMBERS

JOIN P2PI

You May Also Like

Forecast: Holiday E-Commerce Sales to Increase 9% YOY

DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE: Black Friday, Cyber Monday Activation Gallery