comScore: Online desktop sales climb one week before Christmas
With only days to go in the 2016 holiday shopping season, online desktop spending continues to rise.
For the holiday season-to-date, $55.2 billion has been spent online, marking a 13% increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent week, Dec. 12-18, posted a strong 15% growth in online sales, marking $7.6 billion in desktop spending during the last full week before Christmas.
These details were shared by comScore in analysis highlighting U.S. retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the first 48 days of the November-December 2016 holiday season.
"This final full week of online holiday shopping before Christmas saw an uptick in desktop spending, finishing off the season on a high note and bringing the season-to-date growth rate to 13%,” said comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni.
Free Shipping Day (Friday, Dec. 16) saw $967 million in desktop spending, closing out a streak of 22 consecutive days reaching a billion dollars in online desktop sales. This also rounded out the season-to-date total to 30 days achieving this milestone, data showed.
“While the corresponding shopping week last year tailed off in the end, due to it falling two days closer to Christmas, this year we saw strong growth through Free Shipping Day, with four billion-dollar spending days and a notable weekend surge as consumers rushed to get their online orders in with enough time to ship their gifts before the holiday,” Fulgoni added. “The heaviest spending days of the season are now behind us, but there is still another $7 billion-to-$8 billion that will be spent over the balance of the year that will once again get us to new all-time highs for desktop e-commerce.”
