Consumers in the USA spent more than ever before buying presents online for Christmas 2012,generating a flood of extra parcels for delivery to homes across the country, according to new
figures.US online spending grew 14% to $42.3 billion during the November – December holiday season,covering firstly Thanksgiving Day and then the peak pre-Christmas period, leading digitalmeasurement company ComScore said yesterday. The increase, however, was slightly below expectationsas consumers worried about the impact of the fiscal cliff on their finances, it noted.
The three leading US consumer delivery operators, USPS, UPS and FedEx, were expecting recordvolumes for the holiday season, with double-digit growth driven by e-commerce sales. UPS wasexpecting parcel volumes across its global network to be around 10% higher than last year’s recordfigure in the final four-week peak period before Christmas. FedEx forecast a 13% rise in globalvolumes between Thanksgiving and Christmas, citing an “unbelievable” peak season.
“The 2012 online holiday season was once again a very strong season with growth rates in themid-teens as we reached record-setting spending levels,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Thisyear’s growth rate is essentially on a par with last year’s. But despite many positives for theonline sector, this year’s season did not quite perform up to our initial expectation for growthrates in excess of 16% as we fell a billion dollars short of our expected total of $43.4billion.”
He explained: “While November started out at a very healthy 16% growth rate through thepromotional period of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, consumers almost immediatelypulled back on spending, apparently due to concerns over the looming fiscal cliff and what thatmight mean for their household budgets in 2013. With Congress deadlocked throughout December,growth rates softened even further and never quite made up enough ground to reach our originalexpectation.”
ComScore said the latter portion of the season saw several days with particularly strong growth,including Free Shipping Day on Monday, Dec. 17 (up 76% to over $1 billion) and Christmas Day (up36% to $288 million), but they could not make up for the spending growth shortfall earlier in themonth.
The top ten heaviest days for US online spending in 2012 all occurred during the holidayshopping period. The season was once again led by Cyber Monday (Nov. 26) with a record $1.465billion in spending, followed by Tuesday, Dec. 4 with $1.362 billion and Green Monday (Dec. 10)with $1.275 billion. The 2012 holiday season saw 12 days with more than $1 billion spending,comfortably surpassing last year’s total of 10 individual days.
