Holiday Sales Outpace: 2023 Ecommerce Implications
Each year, Adobe and other industry experts release predictions for how online holiday sales will do that year and which days will be the biggest days. Now that the holiday season is over and the final results have been tallied, we’re going to look and see how they did in their predictions and then look to see how to take advantage of this in your business in 2023.
Total Holiday Sales
Many people called for online holiday sales to be flat or even lower than 2021, however Adobe predicted a modest 2.5% increase in holiday sales to $209.7 billion. Luckily for those of us in the ecommerce industry, all of the naysayers were proven wrong, and even Adobe’s prediction proved to be too low - actual 2022 holiday sales were at $211.7 billion, a 3.5% increase over 2021.
Per Day Breakdown
Moving on to look at key days for online sales in the 2022 holiday season, Adobe projected that online sales on Thanksgiving would decrease 1% compared to 2021, but they actually increased by 2.9%.
Black Friday online sales were predicted to drop 1% year over year, but they ended up increasing 2.3% year over year.
Cyber Monday online sales ended up closer to expectations - Adobe predicted a 5.1% increase and the actual results were a 5.8% increase year over year.
Looking at each day throughout the entire holiday season, Cyber Monday and Black Friday were the two biggest days for ecommerce; those two days alone made up almost 10% of all holiday sales. There’s also a clear pattern where daily online sales spiked to a high level on Thanksgiving and then didn’t begin a clear decline until Monday, December 12th, about 10 shipping days before Christmas.
Other Trends
Adobe had predicted that curbside pickup would make up 35% of online orders for the 3 days before Christmas as last minute shoppers looked for the immediacy of the store experience combined with the ease and speed of online shopping. This is one prediction where Adobe missed — the actual number was even higher, with 42% of orders being for curbside pickup.
Continuing a long-running trend of more and more shoppers using mobile devices and tablets, mobile shopping set a new record — on Christmas Day, over 61% of orders came from mobile devices. Perhaps after opening their gifts, shoppers got out their smartphones while still at their family holiday celebration and ordered the things they really wanted?
Many industry experts predicted the ‘end’ of the pandemic-fueled growth in ecommerce sales this holiday season. Ecommerce sales made up 20.6% of all retail shopping during the 2020 holiday season, and then 20.9% in 2021. Many predicted a return to pre-pandemic levels in 2022 - something like the 14.6% of holiday shopping taking place online which is the level it was at in 2019. Like the other doom and gloom predictions, this prediction proved to be incorrect - ecommerce drove a record-setting 21.6% of total retail sales in the 2022 holiday season.
Key Takeaways to Improve Your 2023 Holiday Sales
As we look at these results, there’s a few key takeaways that retailers can apply now. The first is to realize that ecommerce is continuing to grow, and grow rapidly. Despite predictions that things would slow and return to pre-pandemic levels of brick and mortar shopping, ecommerce continued to grow in 2022, so you must invest in improving your ecommerce and omnichannel experiences. A few other takeaways:
Looking at consumer behavior around the 3 days before Christmas, you must offer some type of curbside pickup option before the holidays this year. If you aren’t a store-based retailer, look to find ways to partner with local stores, malls or fulfillment providers to provide some type of local pickup option, such as UPS Access Points.
Expect about 21-22% of your total sales to happen in the holiday season.
The online holiday shopping season will be one day longer in 2023, so the key window for 2023 will most likely be November 23rd (Thanksgiving) through Monday, December 11th - plan your key promotions during this range.
