A report out from comScore says $18.9 billion has been spent online during the first 24 days of the November-December 2013 holiday season, using desktop computers. This is up 14% from the same time period last year ($16.6 billion).
Ahead of the report, Tuesday, November 19th was the heaviest online spending day of the season, reaching $963 million. Both the 14th and 24th also saw over $900 million each.
“The 2013 online holiday shopping season is off to a solid start with nearly $19 billion in desktop e-commerce sales, an increase of more than 14 percent versus last year,” said Andrew Lipsman, comScore VP of Marketing & Insights. “The heaviest online spending day thus far fell just shy of $1 billion in sales, and though we’ve not yet reached that benchmark we can expect to see that spending threshold eclipsed numerous times during the post-Thanksgiving period. Black Friday and Cyber Monday can both be expected to easily surpass that total, with Cyber Monday already beginning to point toward $2 billion.”
“While the early part of the online holiday shopping season has been solid so far, we are tempering our expectations given the shortened 26-day shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year,” said Lipsman. “In addition, with Hannukah beginning in November this year there is some spending that has been pulled forward and likely added a boost to the early November shopping period. That said, our forecast of 14 percent growth for desktop-based buying still represents a strong outlook versus last year that highlights the continued channel shift to online. We also expect m-commerce spending growth to contribute about 2 percentage points to that growth rate, meaning that total digital commerce will grow at a rate of nearly 16 percent.”
The firm believes mobile commerce (which includes tablets) will reach $7.1 billion for the holiday season, which would be 13% of total ecommerce as total spending is expected to be $55.2 billion for the season.
A new Gallup poll released today shows that over half (53%) of Americans say they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to shop online during the holiday season.
Image: comScore