Holiday E-Commerce Falls Short Of Expectations

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

Shorter holiday shopping season and increased promotions take a toll on desktop spending

This online holiday shopping season failed to live up to expectations. Results from comScore show that online desktop spending for the first 52 days (Nov. 2 to Dec. 23) of the holiday season increased ten percent from last year, reaching $42.8 billion. Despite this increase, however, there was not quite the overall increase that analysts were expecting for the holiday season. comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni says, while analysts expected that the shortened holiday season would lead consumers to spend more in the later weeks, this was “not in the cards.” He says, “The final online shopping week saw considerably softer sales than anticipated, including zero billion dollar spending days — although Monday and Tuesday (Dec. 23 and 24) came close.” Following the first 24 days of the holiday season, comScore forecasted that the 2013 holiday desktop e-commerce spending would grow by 14 percent to $48.1 billion.

Fulgoni adds that the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend was encouraging, considering Black Friday raked in $1.2 billion, and the weekend following showed an increase of 34 percent to $1.6 billion. For 2013, the number one top online spending day was Cyber Monday, which brought in $1.7 billion, followed by Tuesday, Dec. 3 and Green Monday, Dec. 9. There were ten days this holiday season where Web spending reached or exceeded $1 billion, however, this is down from the previous year’s 12 days.

While comScore says the shortened holiday season is partially to blame for the fewer $1 billion spending days, Fulgoni also calls attention to the intense promotional atmosphere that characterized this holiday season. “In the end, I think we’ll look back at this online holiday season as one where absolute dollar sales gains in consumer spending were held back by heavy retailer price discounting that occurred in an attempt to stimulate consumer demand, while at the same time, consumers weren’t willing or able to increase their spending rate to fully compensate for the six-day-shorter shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas."

Read “A Unique Approach To Automated Order Fulfillment For Small- to Mid-Sized eCommerce Businesses”

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