The chatter about social shopping reaches a fevered pitch this time of year. I’m well aware that the word of mouth marketing that Social Media infuses into online commerce is well known, but I do like to see some data backing up such assumptions. I’m weird like that, and also because I’ll take any excuse to make and/or look at charts.
Using a few discrete data sources this infographic produced by marketing firm Wpromote uncovers a few interesting trends that are evolving in the United States around the October – December holiday shopping season. According to this data, more and more shoppers are finding their holiday solutions online.
- 20 % increase in online Black Friday spending between 2012 and 2013
- Both Thanksgiving AND Black Friday broke the $1 Billion one day online sales barrier this year
- Mobile was a huge player in both research and sales this year
- Twitter chatter volume around hot products correlates pretty closely with Google search volume
- Most of the tweets mentioning hot products (36%) originated from the United States
- Apparently “Uggs” are back in style
So there you have it, Holiday shopping is (for this year at least) trending heavily towards online purchases and away from brick and mortar. I think the trend is largely due to the fact that going to the mall or a large department store during one of these days is historically unpleasant, and e-commerce and the social media shopping experience are getting more convenient by the day. I expect this trend to continue into next year and beyond.
