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Snowstorms Help Lift Online Sales to New Highs
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Snowstorms this past weekend helped boost online sales 13 percent over the pre-Christmas weekend last year, and the holiday season to date has seen a 4 percent increase, according to an update today on Internet purchases by comScore.
The final shopping weekend of the season (Dec. 19-20) had a strong 13 percent growth rate, with reported online sales of $767 million, as snowstorms on the eastern seaboard prompted “many consumers to finish their holiday shopping from the confines of their own homes,” reported Virginia-based comScore, a provider of “digital marketing” intelligence.
The comScore report is welcome news for credit card issuers, who are seeing much less revolving credit charges this year on in-store holiday purchases — up to one-third fewer shoppers are expected to use their credit cards in stores, some estimates say.
But so far this holiday season – measured by comScore as Nov. 1-Dec. 20 - $25.5 billion has been spent online, a 4 percent increase over the same period last year. Moreover, the week ending Dec. 20 saw a 6 percent increase over same period last year, relative to Christmas, to a new high of $4.8 billion.
comScore also reports that last Tuesday, December 15, set a new single-day record of $913 million in online spending.
But the weather was the most likely contributor to the big double-digt gain this past weekend.
“The major snowstorms hitting the eastern seaboard over the weekend appear to have given holiday e-commerce an additional boost, resulting in the heaviest online spending week on record at $4.8 billion,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.
comScore had earlier reported online sales increases for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, 11 percent and 5 percent, respectively, over last year.
“Retailers have been very aggressive with late season promotions while informing consumers that they could still get their purchases shipped in time for Christmas, and these tactics seem to be paying off,” Fulgoni said.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] on the east coast have turned to online retailers to get their last minute shopping done. Online sales jumped 6% last week to a record, according to comScore Inc. (SCOR), which said the final shopping weekend of the season [...]