A recent customer retail behavior study from SDL, a customer experience management solutions provider, suggests that key holiday shopping dates are losing importance as more consumers have begun to prioritize a positive experience above all else — even great deals. This may be true, in some sense; after all, who wants to get up early just to fight crowds at a Best Buy (News - Alert) when you can get a deal, albeit a lesser one, any time of the year.
There’s one major kink in this theory, though: e-commerce and mobile commerce is up this season. Indeed, a new report from comScore (News - Alert) suggests that holiday retail e-commerce spending so far this year is up 14 percent as opposed to last year. So far, for the first 24 days of November, online shoppers around the world have spent $18.9 billion, with Tuesday, November 19 being the heaviest online shopping day to date at $963 million. Meanwhile, November 14 and November 24 both topped $900 million in online retail spending.
As for mobile commerce, comScore expects shoppers will spend a total of $7.1 billion this holiday season from their tablets and smartphones.
In a way, this both proves and disproves what the SDL study claims about holiday shopping deals. None of these big shopping days was a particularly special shopping day, after all, but then again Black Friday (News - Alert) and Cyber Monday may top them all. At the same time, it suggests that people are still willing to shell out for holiday deals, but less willing to go out to physical stores since they now have the option of staying home while still saving money.
"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 (News - Alert) can both be expected to easily surpass that total, with Cyber Monday already beginning to point toward $2 billion."
Edited by Cassandra Tucker
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