Last Week Shows Biggest Year-over-Year Gains of Holiday Season, Will it be Enough?
Holiday ecommerce continues to grow, but economic factors indicate that online holiday shopping is not growing as much as expected this holiday shopping season. comScore reports that holiday shopping online advanced 19% over ecommerce last year in the same period (Nov. 1 - Dec. 16). However, the L.A. Times points out that this is still lower than the projected 20% growth.
Many reasons are being given for the lower-than-expected growth of ecommerce holiday shopping. One of them is that worries over a coming recession may be prompting consumers to be conservative in their spending, increasing their desire for discounts and bargains. The L.A. Times reports on consumers’ reluctance regarding ecommerce:
“Consumers are waiting for that next big discount,” Larry Freed, chief executive of research firm ForeSee Results Inc., said Friday.
However, the comScore information also shows that last week (the week ending on Dec. 16) boasted a 22% growth over the same week last year. This means that a holiday shopping push this week, as ecommerce businesses use free shipping and discounts to lure customers, could actually bring ecommerce growth in line with forecasts for this year’s online holiday shopping season. comScore emphasizes the importance of this week in ecommerce:
“The current — and final — week of online shopping before Christmas will be especially critical to the overall success of the holiday shopping season.
Tags: ecommerce, online holiday shopping, ecommerce shopping, ecommerce growth,
holiday shopping season, ecommerce businesses
Posted by Miranda | December 18, 2007
Crowdstormer December 20th, 2007
I read earlier somewhere - although cannot remember where now - that people are generally leaving their christmas shopping until later this year than in other years (online and offline shopping). It will be interesting to see whether this last shopping week will see greater spending, evening out the discrepancies between projected and actual rates of growth.
Miranda December 20th, 2007
Indeed. Can’t wait until next week, when the final numbers are out! People are leaving it til later, hoping for bigger discounts in many cases. Others are just scaling back what they are buying, in the hopes that they can weather a possible recession on the horizon.
Last Week Strong for Holiday Ecommerce :: Varien :: Open Source eCommerce Development and Consulting Firm December 22nd, 2007
[…] The final week of pre-Christmas online holiday shopping started strong. According to comScore, Monday the 17th saw a 33% increase and Tuesday the 18th saw a 25% increase over last year. This means that even though growth for the entire online holiday shopping season has been lower than forecast to this point, this week’s strong performance could still nudge the numbers up. […]