Online shoppers spent a record $1.735 billion on Cyber Monday 2013, 18% over the same day last year, but the season as a whole rose only 10% higher than last year to $42.8 billion, according to comScore numbers, which counts only desktop spending.
“Our expectations for the online holiday shopping season anticipated that consumers would spend heavily later into the season out of necessity to make up for the highly compressed holiday shopping calendar this year,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Unfortunately that was not in the cards, as the final online shopping week saw considerably softer sales than anticipated, including zero billion dollar spending days – although Monday and Tuesday came close.”
Fulgoni said of the 2013 shopping season, “In the end, I think we’ll look back at this online holiday season as one where absolute dollar sales gains in consumer spending were held back by heavy retailer price discounting that occurred in an attempt to stimulate consumer demand, while at the same time, consumers weren’t willing or able to increase their spending rate to fully compensate for the six-day shorter shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Cyber Monday’s record day was followed by Tuesday, Dec. 3 with $1.410 billion and Green Monday (Dec. 9) with $1.401 billion. The research firm said the 2013 holiday season saw 10 days with more than $1 billion spending, down from last year’s total of 12 individual days. This was due to the compressed calendar between Thanksgiving and Christmas that featured six fewer days of online shopping, according to the company.
ComScore also reported on the top five gaining product categories for the holiday season: Video Game Consoles & Accessories ranked as the top-gaining product category vs. year ago, followed by Apparel & Accessories, Consumer Electronics (bolstered by smartphone sales), Computer Hardware (bolstered by tablet sales), and Home & Garden.
