Winter Holidays

PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. — With the holiday season officially underway, North American market research company NPD has reported its findings on consumers’ holiday entertaining purchases.

The group’s Consumer Tracking Service, which culls data from the past 12 months ending Oct. 2012, found that 63% of housewares consumers enjoy hosting parties in their homes.

New York -- Cyber Monday appears to be well on its way to breaking all previous records.

By mid-day on Monday, e-commerce sales were up 25.6% for this same time period over Cyber Monday 2011, according to findings from the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. The company analyzes the shopping results of 500 retailers nationwide.

Current mobile shopping data for Cyber Monday includes the following:

Mobile Traffic: The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer's site is 21%.

Evanston, Ill. -- Many consumers who visit a store but then buy online are not driven there by price alone, but rather by a less-than-satisfactory in-store experience, according to results from the annual holiday shopping report by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

New York -- Market share defensibility remains a key challenge for many traditional U.S. retailers, against a backdrop of minimal growth and heavy competition, according to a Fitch Ratings report. (Fitch views trends in market share as a key indicator of a company’s long-term financial outlook.)

Online and mobile fraud prevention needs to be part of every retailer’s brand’s holiday retail strategy. According to Cybersource’s 2011 survey of e-commerce fraud, $3.4 billion in online revenue was lost in 2011 as a result of fraud, and this number is only expected to increase. Although the holidays are just around the corner, there is still time to take action and reduce your exposure to fraudulent mobile channel activities.

Bentonville, Ark. -- As holiday shoppers prepared to battle crowds on Thanksgiving weekend, Wal-Mart workers and supports geared up to protest at stores nationwide, openly criticizing the retailers’ wages, benefits and treatment of employees.

Nine people were arrested in Paramount, Calif., including three Walmart employees, for blocking a busy street. About 1,000 people protested there.

Washington, D.C. -- The National Retail Federation reported that more than 35 million Americans visited retailers’ stores and websites on Thursday – up from 29 million last year – scoring deals on everything from hot electronic items to cashmere sweaters and toys.

According to an NRF survey conducted by BIGinsight over the weekend, traffic and spending grew over the entire weekend. More people than ever before also shopped online and in stores on Black Friday, as 89 million shoppers braved the crowds, up from 86 million last year.

Chicago -- A report released Saturday by ShopperTrak found that Black Friday proved to be a mixed bag for retailers, as retail foot traffic increased over last year, but retail sales decreased slightly.

ShopperTrak estimates that, when compared with Black Friday last year, retail foot traffic rose 3.5% to more than 307.67 million store visits. Retail sales decreased 1.8%, however, with shoppers spending an estimated total of $11.2 billion on Friday.

Bentonville, Ark. -- Walmart U.S. reported Saturday that its Black Friday events were its “best ever,” and followed on the heels of what U.S. president and CEO Bill Simon described as an “impressive Thursday,” on which 22 million customers shopped U.S. Walmart stores.
 

New York -- According to a report by IBM, U.S. shoppers took full advantage of early promotions this holiday season, driving a 17.4% increase in online sales Thanksgiving Day. This increase set the stage for 20.7% growth on Black Friday. The biggest surge came from mobile consumers, with sales reaching 16.3%, led by the iPad.

The data is the result of cloud-based analytics findings from IBM.  

Other findings of the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark revealed the following trends: