comScore Forecasts 15 Percent Growth for 2011 U.S. Holiday E-Commerce Spending
First Three Weeks of November Exhibit Strong Online Spending Activity Spurred by Early-Season Deals — comScore (NASDAQ : SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today reported holiday season retail …
Context & Ripple Effects
comScore's 15 percent forecast extends an arc it has been charting itself: after a record $43.4 billion Q4 2010 that grew 11 percent, and a Black Friday 2010 worth $648 million, up 9 percent, the firm now sees growth accelerating rather than decelerating into the 2011 season. The stated driver is early-season deal activity pulling spending into the first three weeks of November.
The comparison point is 2007, when comScore measured $531 million on Black Friday growing 22 percent before that season ultimately fell short of expectations — so a mid-teens forecast sits between the boom-era pace and the post-recession single digits. It matters because comScore's weekly holiday readings function as the industry's public scoreboard, shaping how retailers time their own promotions.
First-order effects
- Retailers running early-November deals are successfully pulling holiday demand forward, validating compressed promotional calendars over waiting for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
- comScore's forecast sets the benchmark its weekly spending releases will be judged against through December, raising the stakes on each subsequent reading.
Second-order effects
- With comScore's October 'Digital Omnivores' work showing smartphones and tablets driving nearly 7 percent of digital traffic, and 14 million Americans scanning QR or bar codes in June 2011, merchants face pressure to make mobile discovery-to-checkout paths work before the season peaks.
- Competing measurement firms must match comScore's weekly cadence to stay relevant, since the first published number tends to anchor press coverage of the season.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, e-commerce growth re-accelerating from 11 percent toward 15 percent signals online retail taking share from overall holiday retail, with deal-driven early demand becoming a structural feature of the calendar rather than a one-year anomaly.
- The more the industry plans against comScore's numbers, the more a single measurement firm's methodology becomes de facto infrastructure for retail decision-making — a dependency regulators and advertisers may eventually scrutinize.
The trend: U.S. online holiday spending is re-accelerating into double-digit growth, with early-deal promotions and mobile access pulling the shopping season progressively earlier.