While mobile commerce flexed its muscle during Cyber Week, desktop shoppers keep representing this holiday season — and in a strong way.
For the holiday season-to-date, $38.0 billion has been spent online, marking a 12% increase versus the same timeframe last year, according to comScore’s latest 2016 Holiday Insights report. Cyber Week, the seven-day period beginning with Cyber Monday, posted strong growth online, thanks to desktop spending, which raked in $11.0 billion — an increase of 13% compared to the same week last year.
For the first time, online spending surpassed $1 billion each day of the seven week period. Both Cyber Monday and the following Tuesday eclipsed $2 billion in desktop sales.
From a macro level, these seven days blended into an even more significant spending milestone. Starting on Thanksgiving, desktop sales have been on an 11-day streak of billion-dollar spending.
Meanwhile, sales growth has picked up significantly since Thanksgiving, with online desktop spending up a strong 14% year-over-year, compared to an increase of 11% for the period of November that preceded Thanksgiving, comScore said.
“Online holiday commerce continues to perform very well through the week following Cyber Monday,” said comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni. “We’re seeing billion-dollar shopping days become the new norm, with 11 consecutive days eclipsing that milestone on desktop – a trend we expect to continue through the current week and beyond.”
Mobile commerce also continues its upward trajectory this holiday season as mobile buying on smart phones and tablets accounted for $597 million of spending on Thanksgiving (up 26% year-over-year), $797 million on Black Friday (up 41%), and more than $1 billion on Cyber Monday (up 29%).
The success of mobile drove total digital spending growth to surpass 20% on all three days, while Cyber Monday 2016 solidified itself as the largest spending day on record with an astounding $3.7 billion in total digital commerce, data revealed.
“The key shopping days of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday all experienced strong growth rates of buying using mobile devices, giving a boost to total digital sales, with mobile accounting for more than a quarter of online spending on those days,” Fulgoni said. “While mobile continues to have more friction points and therefore lower conversion than desktop, it’s clear that many consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable transacting over these devices.”