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Online spending rose 8.7% during the holiday season from last year, according to data from Adobe Analytics, as deals and the use of AI-powered chatbots helped inspire purchases.
Sales on retailers’ websites and apps totaled $241.4 billion from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31, according to Adobe. The company’s analysis includes more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million unique items and 18 different product categories.
More demand, not higher prices, drove higher online spending, according to Adobe. Adobe’s Digital Price Index found e-commerce prices have fallen every month for 27 months. The company’s figures are not adjusted for inflation, but if they were revised, overall consumer spending would be higher.
The e-commerce results are a promising sign for the retail industry, which has yet to report company-specific sales. Walmart, Target, Macy’s and others will start to post their fiscal fourth-quarter results, including their sales over the key shopping season, in late February.
Other early reads on the holiday season have looked strong, too. Retail sales for the holiday season in the U.S., excluding automotive sales, rose 3.8% year over year for the period from Nov. 1 through Dec. 24, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online sales across payment types.
Deep discounts motivated holiday shoppers to spend, according to Adobe’s data. For every 1% drop in the typical price, demand for merchandise increased by about 1% compared with the 2023 holiday season, Adobe data found. That led to an additional $2.25 billion in online spending.
Vivek Pandya, lead analyst for Adobe Digital Insights, said as prices of groceries and housing remain elevated, consumers are waiting to buy nonessential goods at times of the year when they expect to pay less. He described that pattern as “event-ized buying.”
For example, he said shoppers have opened their wallets during Amazon’s Prime Day event in the summer or during sales days such as President’s Day and Memorial Day.
“There are certain moments and certain opportunities where we see them overindexing their spend, really driving forward, because they see the value,” he said. “And then outside of those periods, we start to see growth kind of draw back down.”
Some of the best online deals during the holiday season were in the electronics category, where discounts peaked at 30.1% off listed price; toys, where price reductions topped out at 28%; TVs, where discounts maxed out at 24.2%; and apparel, where price cuts peaked at 23.2%.
Electronics, apparel, and the furniture and home goods segment were the three top categories for the holiday season, which contributed to about 54% of the total online spending, according to Adobe. Yet the biggest year-over-year spending growth came from groceries, which jumped nearly 13% to $21.5 billion, and cosmetics, which shot up by 12.2% to $7.7 billion.
The AI effect
One of the newer factors nudging spending is AI-powered shopping assistants such as ChatGPT and its competitors.
Traffic to retail sites that came from generative AI-powered chatbots shot up by 1,300% compared with the year-ago holiday season, as more shoppers turned to the technology to look for gift ideas and direct them to cheaper items, according to Adobe. That data included only external chatbots, not those that retailers offer on their own apps or websites.
Pandya said while the technology is young and the base of users still modest, those chatbots are becoming more meaningful drivers of clicks and purchases on retailers’ websites.
“You have a consumer that’s very strategic and thinking a lot about their strategy around where they’re buying, when they’re buying, what’s offering the best deal,” Pandya said, “and that’s where the generative AI sources, the assistants were helping the consumer and kind of co-piloting that journey.”
For many shoppers, smartphones played a central role. Most of the season’s e-commerce purchases — nearly 55% — took place through a smartphone rather than a laptop or other device. That’s up from about 51% in the year-ago holiday season, Adobe found.
The use of buy now, pay later, a credit option that allows shoppers to split their purchase into multiple payments, rose 9.6% year over year and contributed to $18.2 billion in online spending during the holiday period. That marked an all-time high for the holiday season, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday was the biggest day on record for buy now, pay later with $991.2 million in spending.
