Historically, early-through-late December is one of the biggest sales seasons of the year for ecommerce businesses.
We recently took a look at some of the more popular ecommerce metrics and created 20+ benchmarks specifically tailored to the current sales season.
With our Benchmark your site tool, compare your site’s engagement and conversion metrics with over 10,000 other websites this holiday season.
Note: Want to know where you store stands during Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend? Check out our top 9 benchmarks to track during BFCM.
To give insight on your product and digital marketing, we gathered the data from Google Analytics from different industry sectors.
So why did we create the benchmarks? Let’s take a quick look at last year’s holiday sales.
Holiday ecommerce sales in 2018
For ease’s sake, let’s define the holiday shopping period from November through the end of December. Last year, Digital Commerce 360 estimated shoppers spent $122.0 billion with online stores — a massive 17.4% jump from 2017.
They also estimated total ecommerce sales grew ~5.6% over the same period, according to their holiday 2018 estimates report. From the same report, ecommerce represented nearly 17% of all holiday spending, up from 15.2% in 2017.
Explaining the numbers
Over the past decade as online shopping has become more of a preference for consumers (especially when it comes to gift-giving), shoppers have browsed more sites for gift ideas, deals, discounts and more. Shoppers are exercising their options (and taking advantage of stiff seasonal competition between stores), which often leads to increased spending volume across multiple stores — though this may cause stores to see a drop in average order value (AOV) per customer.
Of course, stores tend to also increase their digital marketing spend during hot sales periods and peak shopping seasons, which leads to more online sales.
What about this December?
This past weekend alone (Black Friday Cyber Monday), Shopify reported record-breaking global sales numbers ~$2.9 billion.
On the Shopify network alone — which now boasts over 1 million merchants — merchants across 175+ countries sold $2.9+ billion, up from last year’s $1.8+ billion.
While the holiday shopping period (which is underway) does not necessarily stack up to BFCM weekend by sheer sales alone, it’s a terrific chance for companies to finish out the year strong or get rid of extra inventory from BFCM.
Since December will yield massive sales figures to round out 2019, it’s crucial to track the metrics that matter to your store. If you don’t know where you stand among the stores you compete with, what’s the point?
That’s why we created a free ebook to help you stack up: Top 5 ecommerce benchmarks to track during the holidays.
