Christmas Day shopping is the key for ecommerce outlets 

Tuesday, January 3rd 2011 by Kate Billinghurst

Online ecommerce retailers who invested in website promotion prior to the Christmas period in the hope of garnering more sales are likely to have enjoyed positive sales periods.

That's one revelation to come from a recent survey by comScore, which carried out a survey into the levels of spending online over the holiday season in the US. It found that for this year's holiday season up, $35.3 billion has been spent online.

This figure marks a 15 per cent increase when compared to the corresponding period in the previous year. In the week ending on Christmas Day, online stores witnessed $2.8 billion in spending, which is an increase of 16 per cent when compared with the corresponding week last year.

This figure was helped by what is described as an ecommerce phenomenon, which has been prevalent over the past few years. This is the dramatic increase in Christmas Day spending online, which largely boils down to sales of digital content and subscriptions.

Throw into this mix digital downloads of music, TV, movies, e-books and apps and you are left with a hugely inflated figure.

comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said: "Holiday e-commerce spending has remained strong throughout the season, and we have now reached a record $35 billion in U.S. online sales for the season-to-date.

"We can now say with certainty that the $1.25 billion spent on Cyber Monday will rank it as the heaviest online spending day of the season for the second consecutive year."

On an average day during 2011's holiday season, sales of digital content and subscriptions accounted for a total of 2.8 per cent of retail e-commerce sales. This figure rocketed on Christmas Day itself to over 20 per cent of sales.

This shows that online shopping holds another weapon that it can deploy when it comes to competition from the high street, in the form of Christmas Day shopping.

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