US retail e-commerce spending grew 15% in the Christmas shopping season, according to digitalretail specialist ComScore, providing a welcome boost for parcel delivery companies, while volumes
of returns parcels are expected to be up by around 8%.E-retail spending for the entire November-December 2011 holiday season reached $37.2 billion, anall-time record for the season, with ten individual shopping days surpassing $1 billion inspending, compared to just one day reaching that mark in 2010.
‘Cyber Monday’ – 28 November – ranked number one for the second consecutive year, with sales of$1.25 billion. The second-heaviest spending day was Monday 5 December, at $1.178 billion, followedby ‘Green Monday’ – 12 December – at $1.133 billion. Tuesday 29 November ($1.116 billion) andTuesday, 6 December ($1.107 billion) rounded out the top five.
Also among the top 10 days, with sales of $1.072 billion, was ‘Free Shipping Day’ – Friday 16December – an initiative designed to extend the online-shopping season, when thousands of merchantsoffer free shipping with guaranteed delivery by Christmas Eve.
UPS said it had yet to calculate its final-quarter or holiday-season volumes, although theComScore analysis tallies with the pre-Christmas expectations of UPS, which had said it expectedonline shoppers to spend around $37.6 billion this holiday season, up 15% from the 2010 total of$31.9 billion. Its preparations included more than 400 additional flights per day by UPS Airlinesduring peak days.
The company declined to reveal its expectations for its US domestic parcels volumes in the finalquarter, although volumes had been flat in the three months to 30 September, its most-recentlyreported quarter.
However, UPS revealed that it expected to see the number of returns parcels soar this year andexpected a peak on 3 January with more than 550,000 returns packages shipped – a 7.7% increase overlast year’s levels.
A spokeswoman told CEP-Research: “The large number of returns for the retail industry is mainlydue to the growth in online shipping. The National Retail Federation estimates shoppers will returnmore than $46 billion in merchandise – up 4% from last year and up 10% from two years ago.” Shesaid the company would reveal its final numbers for the holiday shipping season later inJanuary.
Meanwhile, FedEx said it had set a new record on Monday 12 December for the busiest day in thecompany’s history, handling around 17 million shipments in its global network – almost double itsnormal daily volumes. The company said this was driven by shipments via its SmartPost, Ground andHome Delivery products.
FedEx said deliveries of e-commerce sales have been growing at mid-teen rates for the last twoyears and accounted for a growing – but still small – share of overall retail sales – 4.6% in thethird quarter compared with 4.3% last year, and 1% in 2000.
