U.S. Christmas season retail size up to $850 billion, sales reached a new high of 6 years

Us E-commerce sales hit another record high in December during the Christmas season.

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According to the latest news from the media, American consumers have set a six-year retail record this Christmas season. According to MasterCard SpendingPulse online + offline multi-channel data tracking, total Christmas retail sales in the us, excluding cars, rose 5.1 per cent year on year in the November 1 solstice period to more than $850bn on December 24. In addition, the online retail industry record is staggering, a record 2.5 billion orders.




Craig Johnson, president of retail growth consulting firm Customer Growth Partners, said the stock market downturn and partial government closures did not curb consumer shopping confidence and spending budgets.

‘Super Saturday,’ the last Saturday before Christmas, saw higher U.S. retail traffic than black Friday, according to Cuebiq.

Cuebiq analyzed pre-Christmas sales at Target, Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Macy’s, Kohl’s and other major U.S. retail chains, the company found that the retailers had more visits to stores in “Super Saturday” than “Black Friday.” Black Friday is usually seen by retailers as the peak of the holiday sales season, but in 2017, the number of visits to stores on black Friday was only 83 percent of that on super Saturday.

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In addition, the growth of online retailing has led to a boom in shopping throughout the Christmas season. In the case of Adobe Analytics, for example, retail sales gained momentum after entering the holiday season, with online sales up 26.4% from Wednesday to black Friday before Thanksgiving, a sign of a surge in early purchases.

In the final shopping sprint stage of Christmas, tired holiday shoppers are still looking for holiday gifts in crowded stores. Retailers that can provide the simplest shopping experience are popular objects of shopping on the last weekend before Christmas.

Experts said the slowdown in early December was partly due to the early start of Thanksgiving sales, which made it difficult for most retailers to maintain sales throughout the Christmas season. But it is clear that consumers are speeding up their shopping operations before Christmas. Many online retail sites, including Wal-Mart, Target and Amazon, have launched events and offers on Christmas Eve to drive the final minute of the Christmas season.




In addition, mobile devices are playing an increasingly important role in retailers’ e-commerce strategies, 33.3 billion of dollars in e-commerce revenue came from smartphones, up 57% from a year earlier.
The report also found that more than half of e-commerce website traffic (about 58.3 percent) comes from mobile devices.

Amazon and eBay are among the winners of the end of the 2018 season, with more than 1/5 of the 1000 American shoppers surveyed making more than 3/4 online purchases on the sites, according to the survey.