E-Commerce and the Holidays

Posted on | January 3, 2011 | No Comments

By almost all accounts, it was a record holiday season for global e-commerce.

Comscore, one of the major trackers of e-commerce results recorded holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 56 days (November – December 2010) at $30.81 billion, a 13-percent increase over the same time period a year before. The week before Christmas was up 17 percent with $2.45 billion in spending.

CyberMonday, the first weekday after the Thanksgiving holidays reportedly experienced its first billion dollar day. While the day had never been a particularly lucrative one for retailers before the Internet, the increasing hype has actually made it into a major shopping day.

An IBM company, Coremetrics, reported that the individual online shopper spent an average of $194.89. This was up 8.3% from the $180.03 spent last year with richer shoppers driving the sales of luxury items up 24.3% over 2009 with jewelry doing particularly well. One trend worth watching is the use of mobile devices which were used for sales by about 4% of the digital shoppers. Some good news for employers concerned about a day of lost productivity was that shopping appeared to peak around 9am leaving employees to put in a full day’s work. Download their full report.

Factors driving the success included offers of free shipping, aggressive discounts and the ability to capture repeat sales by emailing customers from the previous year.

Projections for Asia were even higher with the Chinese expected to have a larger percentage of online shoppers buying online on CyberMonday than the US or Europe reported Retail in Asia.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

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