E-commerce has come of age, and is no longer the little brother of bricks and mortar retail. What proponents of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) have known all along, research released today supported–online holiday sales are on fire.
According to Comscore:
For the holiday season-to-date, $23.9 billion has been spent online, marking an 8-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year (and a 25-percent increase if using the alternate comparison of the 4-week period preceding Thanksgiving).
Cyber Monday reached $1.735 billion in desktop online spending, up 18 percent versus year ago, representing the heaviest online spending day in history and the second day this season (in addition to Black Friday’s $1.198 billion) to surpass $1 billion in sales. The weekend after Thanksgiving posted particularly strong growth online, raking in $1.594 billion in spending for an increase of 34 percent compared to the same weekend last year. For the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online buying from desktop computers totaled $5.3 billion, up 22 percent versus last year.
While internet sources other than “desktops” are not mentioned, mobile has to add another considerable sum to this based on the presence of smartphones and tablets in use among Americans.
While Amazon is clearly the primary beneficiary of the trend, several other retailers have a massive online presence. The websites of Walmart (NYSE: WMT) and Target (NYSE: TGT) were both in Comscore’s Top 50 Most Visited sites last month.
The Comscore data beg the question, which grows each year, of whether the multibillion physical store infrastructure maintained by big box and department store retailers can survive. The answer is likely “no”, at least not at current levels. The dozen largest retailers in the U.S. have tens of thousands of locations among them. often grouped together in malls or shopping centers. They likely already steal customers from one another as they battle on price and merchandise. Now, in a manner unexpected less than two decades ago, they have to deal with the progeny of the retail internet as well.
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