2012 holiday ecomm spend tops $42 billion

Other hot spending days included Black Friday ($1.042 billion, November 23) and Free Shipping Day ($1.013, December 17). The Thanksgiving Weekend (November 24-25) also showed strong spending at $1.187 billion.

"The 2012 online holiday season was once again a very strong season with growth rates in the mid-teens as we reached record-setting spending levels," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. "This year's growth rate is essentially on a par with last year's. But despite many positives for the online sector, this year's season did not quite perform up to our initial expectation for growth rates in excess of 16 percent as we fell a billion dollars short of our expected total of $43.4 billion. While November started out at a very healthy 16-percent growth rate through the promotional period of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, consumers almost immediately pulled back on spending, apparently due to concerns over the looming fiscal cliff and what that might mean for their household budgets in 2013. With Congress deadlocked throughout December, growth rates softened even further and never quite made up enough ground to reach our original expectation."

Perhaps one of the most interesting findings over the 2012 holidays: that shopping in December is softening rather than growing. While the spend in December remained strong, comScore's statistics show the strongest sales are earlier in the shopping season. \

According to the data the hottest spending weeks were between mid-November (11/11) and mid-December (12/16); between those dates ecommerce spending grew between 9% and 15% Year over Year; the highest spending came in the week of December 16 with shopping doling out just over $7 billion to online outlets.

Tags: 2012 holiday shopping trends, comScore, ecommerce trends, online shopping trends