Online data reveals final holiday tally

It was a record year for online sales this past holiday season, but Target saw others experience stronger growth, according to the most recent site visitation statistics from online measurement firm comScore.

As previously reported, the size of the prize this holiday season was $37.2 billion. That’s the volume of online sales comScore recorded during November and December, which was a 15% increase from the prior year.

Target had roughly 37.3 million unique visitors in December, down from 40.2 million visitors in November and roughly flat with the prior year, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Walmart had 55.8 million unique visitors in December, which was also lower than the 58.5 million visitors it had in November, but Walmart’s December 2011 figure was well ahead of the 51.4 million visitors it had last December.

A similar situation existed as Best Buy and Sears where December figures were less than November, but still above December 2010. Best Buy had 34.5 million visitors in December, down from 36.5 in November, but above the prior December’s 29.3 million visitors. Sears had 29.8 million visitors in December, down from 31 million in November, but above the prior December’s 28.7 million.

Bucking the trend of decelerating traffic from November to December was Amazon.com, which had 114.7 million visitors in December, compared with 112.8 million in November and well above the prior December’s 91.1 million unique visitors.