The smartphone has certainly made its presence known this holiday season by accounting for around 18 % of the $69 billion worth of e-commerce sales as per data that was released on Friday.
Online retail sales grew by an estimated 13 % in Nov and Dec 2015 as compared to the same months in 2014. This is much more than the 3.3 % YoY growth that retail sales saw for the holiday season. But the data has also suggested that many consumers have opted for brick and mortar stores during the last week of Christmas too as compared to previous years.
Sales through mobile devices, both smartphones and tablets, reached $12.65 billion which is a huge 58.5 % increase over the $7.98 billion worth of sales from the holiday season in 2014.
Desktop e-commerce sales accounted for a $56.43 billion sale which is up by 5.9 % from the $53.31 billion of 2014.
The total figure of $69.08 billion was up by 13% as compared to last year’s total of $61.29 billion. Earlier predictions had said that sales will increase by around 14 % to $70 billion.
Earlier in the season, data had shown that desktop e-commerce was most probably going to underperform with a projected increase of just 9 % for the channel. On the other hand, mobiles exceeded the expected increase of 47 %. But retailers still managed to come close to the 14 % estimate for overall growth anyway.
Online sales were a 20.2 % part of retail sales between the holiday period of Oct 31 to Jan 4. These figures were determined after studying data from more than 139000 e-commerce websites as well as 1.3 million merchant locations throughout the U.S. which had sales activity for at least thirteen months at the beginning of the period.
Average order sizes fell by 0.2 % as compared to a 0.1 % increase for 2014. The number of transactions increased by 3.4 % though as compared to an increase of just 3.2% in 2014.
Online shopping had represented 20.6 % of total sales till December 2014 but ended this season at just 20.2 %. This was a clear indication that many customers chose to abandon online shopping around Christmas time and opt for physical stores instead.
Benzamin H
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