America’s $221 Billion Online Christmas

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 23, 7:52AM EST

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America’s $221 Billion Online Christmas — © jetcityimage / iStock Editorial via Getty Images

Every year, several research firms and associations forecast Christmas holiday retail sales. The most well-known of these is the National Retail Federation. The NRF predicts that 182 million people will do holiday shopping from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, which would be a record. However, this forecast does not show the extent to which online shopping continues to seize more and more of the dollars spent over the year-end holidays.

The most carefully followed data for holiday e-commerce comes from Adobe Digital Insights. Adobe, one of America’s largest tech companies, has access to sales trends because of its cloud services used by tens of thousands of retail establishments. This enables Adobe to track 1 trillion visits to retail sites over the holidays.

Adobe recently issued its 2023 Holiday Shopping Forecast. The primary conclusion of its authors is that e-commerce sales will reach $221.8 billion this year, up 4.4% from last year. The data also signal a significant shift in how people shop online. “Mobile devices will overtake desktops this holiday season, accounting for 51.2% of online spending for the holiday season and amounting to a record $113 billion.” After decades of people shopping on sites like Amazon.com using PCs and Macs, this shopping has migrated to smartphones.

What does this trend mean to retailers? Among the most significant changes is the extent to which e-commerce sites must be “smartphone first.” The smartphone version of Amazon.com is vertical, while the PC version is horizontal. The navigation is much simpler for smartphones. More than any other online retailer, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is likely to be state of the art. It has been for three decades and continues to be today the No. 1 e-commerce destination on the internet. Walmart, another major online retailer, maybe a poor place to shop.

Just as retailers had to grapple with moving from physical stores to PCs, they now need to operate in a world where buyers shop on their phones. This evolution has already triggered the death of several physical retail brands.

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.