It’s been just under two weeks since Christmas and the final data on online holiday sales has been unveiled by a pair of trusted industry resources reaffirming what we’ve been saying for the better part of a month: e-tailers struck gold with consumers this holiday shopping season.
comScore says that shoppers spent a record $32.6 billion online this holiday shopping season and that overall sales were 12 percent higher than 2009’s $29.1 billion, exceeding the 11 percent increase comScore had projected in late November.
Meanwhile, in a separate report, the MasterCard Advisors Spending Pulse says that December online sales increased 17.6 percent, the highest year-over-year gain since December of 2007 and a solid follow-up to the 12 percent of growth the SpendingPulse cited in November.
While MasterCard did not put a dollar figure on total December online sales in this round of data, another Spending Pulse report last month had forecasted that total e-commerce sales between October 31 and December 23 would be about $36.4 billion. That forecast would represent a 15.5 percent increase on 2009 holiday web spending.
Regardless, no matter how you slice it, it’s clear that more U.S. consumers chose to use the web as a means of leveraging the still-shaky economic situation they’re facing in order to buy their gifts this year and the result was the highest grossing holiday season in e-commerce history.
“The 2010 online holiday shopping season was a memorable one in which we saw spending rebound strongly from the recession of 2008 and 2009, and slightly exceed even our early expectations,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
comScore compiled its data based on the web usage of more than 2 million online consumers who allow the company permission to keep tabs on their browsing activity. The Spending Pulse report is based on the retail sales of at least 72,000 merchants nationwide.
Both reports also detailed which individual days throughout the season saw the highest e-commerce sales, though the results do differ a bit.
According to MasterCard, there were six days from November 30 to December 23 that recorded $1 billion in sales, though comScore reports only one-Cyber Monday, which was the busiest online shopping day in history.
The rest of comScore’s 5 busiest online shopping days were as follows:
Dec 13 (Green Monday): $954 million
Dec 6: $943 million
December 17 (Free Shipping Day): $942 million
December 16: $930 million
That’ll put a wrap on our holiday 2010 coverage, but it was a great year indeed! Leave us your thoughts and comments!
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