More buyers spent more money online this holiday season

The New Year signals the end of the holiday shopping season, and according to data from Slice Intelligence, this year’s online holiday shopping season was the strongest ever. One of the more impressive numbers regarding this year’s online holiday shopping season isn’t just that there were 12 percent more buyers than last year, but that these shoppers spent $62.03 more than their 2016 versions. Online shoppers spent an average of $637.77 in 2017 compared with $575.74 in 2016.

Amazon was outpaced in terms of growth during the holiday shopping season but retained its market dominance. In terms of dollars spent, Amazon controlled 38 percent of the online holiday shopping season, which is impressive in its own right, but even more so knowing that Best Buy was second with a comparatively paltry four percent.

Considering how much growth retailers like Costco, Target, and Kohl’s enjoyed this holiday shopping season, it’s notable that not one of the top 10 brands we’ve been tracking saw market share increase by more than .6 percent (Target). Target snagged more market share than Amazon did this season, but Amazon still increased its share by a half of a percent.

Amazon’s best month of 2017 was July, which plays host to Amazon’s own shopping holiday, Prime Day. There were five months this year in which Amazon commanded at least 40 percent of the e-commerce market and July tops the list with 41.7 percent. Amazon’s second strongest month of 2017 was December (40.6 percent), showing that as holiday shopping deals and discounts expire, Amazon is there to pick up the pieces.

The two biggest shopping days of the holiday season made up almost 10 percent of the revenue for the entire season. Black Friday and Cyber Monday accounted for 4.7 percent and 4.8 percent of the 61 day total, respectively. The six biggest days of the season all occurred between Thanksgiving and the day after Cyber Monday.

With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.