Holiday Shoppers to Spend More with Credit Cards
According to the National Retail Federation, the average American holiday shopper will spend $749.51 on their holiday shopping in 2012. That is a 1.2 percent improvement over the spending level a year earlier.
So far, the data for shopping has been favorable. Black Friday shopping offline totaled to more than $22 billion in 2012. Customers also visited more stores, with data researchers finding that Americans made more than 594 million visits to unique stores. A visit is counted when one person goes through one store. Given the American population of just over 320 million people, most shoppers visited more than one store.
Online shopping was the fastest growing part of the holiday shopping season. Internet sales came in at a pace 30% higher than a year prior. Sales made online are conducted primarily with credit and debit card transactions. Credit card companies are looking for new ways to attract shoppers online, where the only way to pay is by card.
Among the biggest winners was Walmart.com. The company announced a record setting online sales day at Walmart.com, having sold more on Cyber Monday than at any point in the history of the ecommerce website. It’s believed that eBay – better known as an auction site – and Amazon – a mass market online retailer – may have also set records with heavy discounts for online shoppers.
The National Retail Federation believes that total Black Friday weekend sales, which includes Cyber Monday, came in just shy of $60 billion. The total revenues won’t be confirmed until retailers report their results directly, but estimates have historically been within only a few percentage points of total sales volume.
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