Online Holiday Spending Up 18%
-- JCK-Jewelers Circular Keystone, 12/3/2007 9:32:00 AM
More than $13.4 billion has been spent online during the first 30 days of the holiday (Nov. 1-30), an 18 percent increase over the previous year, according to comScore, Inc. The heaviest online spending day of the season thus far was Cyber Monday (Nov. 26) with $733 million in sales.
All figures by the Reston, Va.-based company, which measures digital data, excludes travel, auctions, and large corporate purchases.
Cyber Monday sales represented a 21 percent increase from the previous year, comScore said. Other big spending days so far this season include Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 22) with a 29 percent increase in ales over the previous year, and Black Friday with a 22 percent increase.
“This most recent week saw several very strong days for online retail spending,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Beginning with a record $733 million on Cyber Monday, each of the next three days also surpassed $700 million in sales, resulting in more than $4 billion in online spending during the week.”
Cyber Monday has historically represented the first significant spike in online holiday spending because it is the first working day after the Thanksgiving holiday, and shopping from work remains a key component of total online shopping behavior. For the first 30 days of the holiday season, 45.5 percent of all online retail spending came from work locations, edging out the 44.1 percent of spending from home.
“Even though the vast majority of Internet-enabled homes now have high speed connections, shopping from work remains a key component of online holiday retail spending,” Fulgoni said. “Also interesting is that despite the declining value of the U.S. dollar, the share of spending from international locations dropped versus last year. This would appear to indicate that maturing international e-commerce markets are succeeding in keeping more foreign online spending overseas.”
From January, through October, consumers have spent approximately 93.6 billion online, a 21 percent increase year-over-year, comScore said. The company projects that online spending for the holidays will grow 20 percent year-over-year to $29.5 billion.
