Holiday Spending up 14.6% as E-Commerce Beats Brick-and-Mortar

E-commerce sales hit record highs this year as Americans continue to move their holiday shopping online.

According to Mastercard’s SpendingPulse report, online retail grew 18.8% over last year’s holiday season. That’s enough to make online sales a record 14.6% of holiday shoppers total spend, the report says.

Online consumers this year spent 17% more on apparel, 8.8% more on jewelry, 10.7% more on electronics, and 6.9% more at department stores. 

Overall, holiday spending jumped 3.4% compared to 2018.

The strong numbers came in spite of 2019’s unusually short holiday season, commonly defined as the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Shoppers had six days fewer than they had in 2018.

Steve Sadove, an advisor for MasterCard, said in a press release that retailers adapted to the shortened season. 

“Due to a later than usual Thanksgiving holiday, we saw retailers offering omnichannel sales earlier in the season, meeting consumers’ demand for the best deals across all channels and devices.”

Interestingly – or ominously – retailers who accepted crypto or managed crypto payments were slow to respond when we asked them how their holiday shopping season went. eGifter, a gift card trading service, noted that it had not yet “crunched the numbers” on holiday sales but that “We saw growth in overall crypto sales,” said Bill Egan, the site’s VP of Marketing.

“We saw more gifting with crypto in 2019, compared to buy-for-self use cases in prior years,” he said.

Payment processor BitPay found the holidays quite inspiring as well.

“We saw twice our daily averages of processed volume leading up to the holiday,” said BitPay’s CMO, Bill Zielke.

It will be interesting to see what kind of statistics surface over the next few seasons as e-commerce becomes king and crypto payments come to the fore.

Photo by Adam Nieścioruk on Unsplash