Breaking Down the Top Trends of This Holiday Shopping Season

By Chris Lange Published Jan 10, 12:20PM EST

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Breaking Down the Top Trends of This Holiday Shopping Season — © artisteer / Getty Images

The holiday season has come and gone. As retailers have been reporting their sales for this two-month period, there has been a not-so-surprising pattern of consumers shopping online. Salesforce.com took a look at this trend, as well as some of the other prevalent trends that played out this holiday season.

For the report, Salesforce combined insights on the activities of hundreds of millions of global shoppers in more than 30 countries, billions of consumer engagements and millions of customer service cases between November 1 and December 31, 2019.

Overall, Salesforce data showed an 8% increase in digital spend over the 2019 shopping season, with $723 billion in digital revenue worldwide.

With a later Thanksgiving and shortened holiday selling season, retailers made every day count, pushing out discounts and promotions earlier than ever. Early marketing activity was a success in generating buzz the week leading up to Cyber Week, with digital traffic growing 13% over the same period in 2018.

Digital revenues fell 27% during the week leading up to Christmas. This was likely due to a smoothing out of demand throughout the year. Despite the softness in late season buying, retailers offering click-and-collect saw big gains as shoppers scrambled to complete their last-minute holiday purchases. Retailers offering this capability on their e-commerce sites saw 56% more active digital shoppers in the final five days of the season. Additionally, those retailers also collected 18% more digital revenue share after the shipping cutoff.

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Last year ended with mobile being the number one device driving digital traffic and orders. To put that into context, the decade began with mobile driving very little digital traffic or orders. This holiday season, peak days like Christmas saw up to 80% of digital traffic and 65% of digital orders come through a mobile device.

Rob Garf, Vice President, Industry Strategy for Retail, Salesforce, commented:

Throughout the 2019 holiday shopping season, retailers saw success with mobile commerce, store pick up and personalization via artificial intelligence and social engagement, removing friction in the ways shoppers browsed and purchased. Mobile certainly catered to people on the go this holiday season and in 2020 brands should be looking for ways to integrate this experience into physical stores for a true omnichannel shopping journey.

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About the Author Chris Lange →

Chris Lange is a writer for 24/7 Wall St., based in Houston. He has covered financial markets over the past decade with an emphasis on healthcare, tech, and IPOs. During this time, he has published thousands of articles with insightful analysis across these complex fields. Currently, Lange's focus is on military and geopolitical topics.

Lange's work has been quoted or mentioned in Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, USA Today, MSN, Yahoo, The Verge, Vice, The Intelligencer, Quartz, Nasdaq, The Motley Fool, Fox Business, International Business Times, The Street, Seeking Alpha, Barron’s, Benzinga, and many other major publications.

A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, Lange majored in business with a particular focus on investments. He has previous experience in the banking industry and startups.