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First 23 days of November saw $17.5 billion in desktop e-commerce

Friday, November 21 has been the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $914 million in desktop spending.

November 26, 2014

Measurement and analytics firm comScore has reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 23 days of the November-December 2014 holiday season. For the holiday season-to-date, $17.5 billion has been spent online using desktop computers, marking an 11-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. Friday, November 21 has been the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $914 million in desktop spending. Two other individual shopping days (Wednesday, Nov. 12 and Wednesday, Nov. 19) have also surpassed the $900 million threshold.

"The 2014 online holiday shopping season is off to a very good start with $17.5 billion in desktop e-commerce sales, an increase of 11 percent versus last year and still very much on pace to meet our forecast of 14 percent desktop growth for the full season," said Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman emeritus. "Although current growth rates are trailing slightly the anticipated full season growth rate, it is important to note that this gap should be essentially made up with the extra shopping day between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year compared to last year. In addition, given the recent strength on certain individual spending days it is likely we'll see our first ever billion dollar spending day occur prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, before the heaviest part of the season even kicks off."

Several of the key online shopping days are set to occur within the next two weeks, beginning with Thanksgiving and Black Friday (Nov. 27-28), followed closely by Cyber Monday (Dec. 1) and finally Green Monday (Dec. 8). Although Cyber Monday and Green Monday have historically been the most important days of the online holiday shopping season, Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday have rapidly gained in importance in the past few years. In fact, among the key shopping days, Thanksgiving has had the highest five-year growth rate at 166 percent, while Black Friday has grown 124 percent during that time — both significantly outpacing the growth of Cyber Monday and Green Monday.

"With many retailers opening their doors on Thanksgiving Day in recent years, this has established an expectation with some consumers that it's OK to begin their holiday shopping in earnest on that day," said Fulgoni. "However, with some retailers reversing course and opting this year to keep their doors closed and promote online deals instead, we may see another exceptionally strong year of growth in online buying on Thanksgiving which could push sales as high as the $1 billion mark on that day — which would certainly be a far cry from 2008 when we saw barely a quarter-billion in spending."