PayPal Holiday Predictions? It Will Be The Season That Mobile Made

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas — as anyone who has been in a store during the last few weeks can attest.

But what will Christmas look like? That is the $64,000 question this year, and while most sources are expecting it to be a par year at least to a good year at best, the details are still eagerly awaited.

But at least one piece of data looks like a truth we can start taking for granted ahead of time — it is going to be a banner year for online shopping.

How banner? According to PayPal, shoppers this year can be expected to log on, particularly to mobile, tune in and big for Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

How big?

According to the digital spend data, buying a car (or two) on one’s phone will not be out of the question, as the biggest predicted mobile purchase will be $64,000.

And the shopping will be ubiquitous. About 35 percent of Americans are open to the idea of shopping at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and about half of all Americans plan to multitask their post-dinner TV binging with the holiday shopping. Millennials are even more proactive — 59 percent of them will shop while they binge-watch. Others will wait until the relatives have turned in and shop in bed next to their spouse (around one-third).

And then, there are the truly classy — and time-efficient — one-fifth of all Americans who will be doing their Christmas shopping from the bathroom.

And even for those who do not take mobile commerce to the time-saving extreme of the toilet, online shopping will still be the efficient way to go. In-store shoppers expect to wait in lines for nearly an hour this season, while Cyber Monday shoppers plan to spend less than 30 minutes total shopping.

And perhaps saving all that time is making customers feel generous. Consumers will donate $259, on average, this holiday season, with men and donors living out west among the most generous in 2016.

If past is prologue — a thing 2016 has given us reason to doubt — then Cyber Monday will likely be a good time for PayPal. At peak last year on Cyber Monday, PayPal was processing 450 payments per second.

And this year, it is looking to beat that.

It may or may not be a holly-jolly Christmas for retailers — the jury is still out. But mobile shoppers and mobile enablers look on track to be jingling all the way.