NRF: Online Sales Up 8 Percent This Year

Visions of sugar plum online profits may be dancing in retailers’ heads.

Bloomberg said on Monday (Dec. 7) that the months of November and December can hold as much as 30 percent of a retailer’s top line in just a few weeks — no surprise, given the holiday shopping frenzy that lies within that timeframe.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) stated that holiday sales will grow by 3.7 percent over last year, with a value of about $630 billion in the United States alone, and that comes on top of about 4.1 percent growth seen in the year ago period. The leap toward using mobile phones as a shopping conduit continues as the online sales channel will see 8 percent growth year on year to as much as $105 billion.

[bctt tweet=”Holiday sales will grow by 3.7 percent over last year, said the NRF.”]

Drilling down a bit into the macro-sentiment, the NRF said that its own research shows shoppers are relatively sanguine about the economy, with only 34 percent of those surveyed expressing “concern” over the state of the economy — enough so that it would affect holiday spending plans. The 2015 data offers a strong turnaround from 2009, which was, of course, a year closer to the financial crisis, with a retail sales value of $503 billion and two-thirds of Americans reporting real impact from the economic downturn.

Data tabulated by the NRF also shows that shoppers tend to reserve the bulk of their spending for their own family members, with $480 spent on average. The regional shakeout of spenders showed that Palo Alto residents budget about $2,900 for holiday spending. The nationwide average comes to around $806 for the shopping season, said the NRF. There are also areas where having incomes above the nationwide median is no guarantee of lavish gift-giving, with New Haven, Connecticut, and other well-off areas coming in below the average.