Online shoppers spent more than $200 billion for the holidays for the second-straight year, breaking another record, with sales spiking above $11 billion on Cyber Monday alone, according to data provided by Adobe.
Total sales for the 2022 holiday period, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, reached a record $211.7 billion, Adobe said, up 3.5% from $204.5 billion a year ago.
The results topped the projections Adobe provided in October of $209.7 billion.
The biggest online shopping day of the holiday season was Cyber Monday (Nov. 28), as sales of $11.3 billion was up 4.6% from a year ago. The second-biggest shopping day was Black Friday (Nov. 25) at $9.12 billion.
Online sales were $3.14 billion on Veterans Day (Nov. 11), $5.3 billion on Thanksgiving (Nov. 24) and $2.63 billion on Dec. 18, the week before Christmas. The day with the least online sales during the period was Christmas Eve at $1.26 billion.
The best day to buy toys during the period, or when the category saw the deepest discounts, was Nov. 27, the day before Cyber Monday. For electronics, the best days to buy online were also Nov. 27 and Dec. 20, while the best day to buy apparel was Dec. 31, or Dec. 16 on a pre-Christmas basis.
D.A. Davidson analyst Michael Baker said that while consumers did indeed “show up for Christmas,” there was a lot of price discounting to move inventory.
The ProShares Online Retail exchange-traded fund
ONLN,
fell 5.1% during the holiday period, compared with the S&P 500 index’s
SPX,
7.1% rise. Since then, the online retail ETF has gained 4.3% while the S&P 500 has slipped 0.8%.
