If you have any retail space you are working on, this article really impressed me with the depth and detail of retail data. - Jerry Slusky
Retail sales over the holiday season grew by 3% to $626.1 billion last year, below the forecasted growth rate of 3.7%, reports the NRF, which also noted that non-store holiday sales grew by 9%. Weather, inventory challenges and early-starting discounts contributed to the lower-than-forecast increase, per the report.
Meanwhile, recent figures from Adobe indicate that online sales grew by 12.7% during November and December, exceeding its forecast of 11% growth. Of note, mobile grew to represent half of all traffic during the holiday period, although that growth came exclusively from smartphones (up 9% points to 39%) as tablet traffic declined by 3% points (to 11% share). Still, desktops accounted for the vast majority (73%) of sales.
A previous report from comScore tabbed desktop retail sales growth at 6%, with preliminary figures indicating mobile sales growth of 59% contributing to an overall e-commerce rise of 13%.
For its part, Custora reports e-commerce growth of 12.1% over November and December, with more than 30% of sales being placed on mobile devices. A strong majority (76.9%) of mobile orders were placed on Apple devices. Custora’s figures also indicate that search (organic: 21.5%; paid: 17.7%) drove almost 40% of orders, followed by email marketing (20% share).
Read the complete, in-depth reports and analysis here. There are over 80 reports cited.