Online Holiday Shopping to Be Nearly 50% of Sales

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 1:55AM EST · Published Oct 26, 9:10AM EDT

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Online Holiday Shopping to Be Nearly 50% of Sales — © Thinkstock

The desperate situation of retailers is about to become worse. Holiday shoppers intend to spend 47% of their money online, according to a new survey.

E-commerce has only been in full swing for about a decade, ushered in by broadband and the genius of Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN). What was a tiny portion of the sector has completely changed it, and for the huge majority for the worse.

According to the new Deloitte 2016 Holiday Survey:

According to this year’s holiday survey, consumers are more likely to shop online than they are to visit popular brick and mortar locations such as discount/value stores and traditional department stores. While the Internet has been a top shopping destination for years, this season it runs away as the venue of choice. Whether they plan to skip the crowds at their local stores on Black Friday still needs to be seen, but our research reveals that half of consumers intend to shop for holiday gifts online this holiday season.

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Online shoppers are not just browsing either. In fact, consumers polled in our survey plan to spend just as much online as they do in physical stores (47 percent), another milestone in our holiday survey history. Just two years ago, store spending was 12 percentage points ahead of online purchasing.

Online holiday shopping is likely to take some share from popular store formats both big and small. Fewer people plan to visit standalone “big box” retail stores. This number dropped from 63 percent to 59 percent this year. The number of consumers who plan to visit traditional malls this year fell slightly from 53 percent to 50 percent. Shoppers who plan to visit independent stores that are not in a mall dropped four percentage points to 38 percent.

If the forecast is correct, Amazon’s holiday sales will grow in the double digits again, and Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) will be badly crippled.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.