Prior to Christmas, comScore put out a report indicating that online shopping reached a new record in the U.S. Now that Christmas is over, they’ve put out a new report putting online holiday spending up to $35.3 billion in the U.S. That’s a 15% increase over last year.
Those numbers are for the first 56 daqys of the November – December holidays season, with the most recent week (ending Dec. 25) bringing in $2.8 billion on its own (up 16% from last year).
“Holiday e-commerce spending has remained strong throughout the season, and we have now reached a record $35 billion in U.S. online sales for the season-to-date,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “We can now say with certainty that the $1.25 billion spent on Cyber Monday will rank it as the heaviest online spending day of the season for the second consecutive year, but we should also note that it was accompanied by nine other billion dollar spending days this year.”
comScore points out a dramatic increase in Christmas Day purchases of digital content and subscriptions, including: music, TV, movie, ebook and app downloads, over the last few years. With smartphones and tablets rising in popularity, it’s not hard to see why this would be the case.
In fact, iOS and Android both had pretty good holidays. Android reported 3.7 million device activations over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
“On an average day during the 2011 holiday season-to-date (Nov. 1 – Dec. 26), Digital Content & Subscriptions accounted for 2.8 percent of retail e-commerce sales, but on Christmas Day the category accounted for more than 20 percent of sales,” comScore says. “Consistent with past years, comScore expects sales for this category of products to remain elevated throughout the entire week following Christmas Day.”
This week should be a pretty big week, as people spend their holiday gift money.
