Economy

Holiday Online Sales Up 18% to Record $108 Billion

Paul Ausick

Published: January 16, 2018 1:15 pm

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 4:27 am

The 2017 holiday shopping season saw online sales hit a record $108.2 billion, up 17.7% compared with 2016. Revenue generated by mobile devices rose to $35.9 billion, 33.1% of all online sales and 28% higher than 2016 mobile-generated sales.

The data were reported Tuesday by Adobe Analytics, which tracks 80% of online spending for the 100 largest U.S. retail websites.

Last Friday, the National Retail Federation (NRF) reported that holiday season (November and December) sales rose 5.5% last year to a total of $691.9 billion, including $138.4 billion (up 11.5% year over year) in online and other nonstore sales.

As Adobe noted in its summary, rising online sales are good news across the board:

Booming online sales doesn’t mean brick-and-mortar stores are obsolete, however. In fact, a U.S. Census report in the summer of 2017 found that 90 percent of all retail purchases in America were made in brick-and-mortar locations. And 43 percent of millennials prefer to research brands and products online before shopping in-store.

NRF CEO Matthew Shay said:

We knew going in that retailers were going to have a good holiday season but the results are even better than anything we could have hoped for, especially given the misleading headlines of the past year. Whether they shopped in-store, online or on their phones, consumers were in the mood to spend, and retailers were there to offer them good value for their money. With this as a starting point and tax cuts putting more money into consumers’ pockets, we are confident that retailers will have a very good year ahead.

Adobe released its data at the NRF 2018 “Retail’s Big Show” conference in New York.

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