E-commerce Doesn’t Stop for Christmas

More consumers went online to shop on Christmas Day this year, new IBM data show.

Image: Gunnar Pippel / Shutterstock

Christmas Day had its diversions: For some, there was basketball, while for a growing number of others there was online shopping.

For the holiday season to date, $35.3 billion has been spent online, marking a 15 percent increase versus the corresponding days last year, according to new figures from comScore released today. The most recent week, ending Sunday, December 25, brought $2.8 billion in spending, an increase of 16 percent versus the corresponding week in 2010.

The increase included Christmas Day. IBM Coremetric Benchmark’s snapshot of online shopping on Christmas Day revealed 16.4 percent growth over Christmas Day 2010, with the dollar amount of purchases up 172.9 percent, based upon IBM data from 500 e-commerce websites, not including Amazon.com, the largest. That's similar to what happened on Thanksgiving Day when a surprising number of consumers unwilling to wait for Black Friday's starting gun began shopping online on Turkey Day itself.

The day after Christmas was even busier, with online sales up 27.8 percent over December 26, 2010, according to IBM data.

Relatives who claimed they were checking work email on their smartphones or tablets the day after Christmas could have been doing some shopping on the sly: IBM data showed a boost in mobile traffic, with 16.4 percent of all online sessions on a retailer’s site initiated from a mobile device, up from 7.8 percent in 2010—an increase of 109.3 percent in overall traffic.

The percentage of sales from mobile devices grew, reaching 11.3 percent versus 4.3 percent in 2010, reflecting an increase of 164.9 percent in sales. The iPad led all mobile device traffic at 6 percent, followed by iPhone at 5.8 percent and Android at 4.6 percent.