U.S. holiday shoppers spend record $108 billion online: Adobe

U.S. holiday shoppers spend record $108 billion online: Adobe

Shannon Stapleton

Adobe, which collects its data by measuring 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. web retailers, said the amount was 14.7 percent higher than last year's total.

Mobile platforms made up 52 percent of traffic to retail websites during the November-December period and were responsible for a third of all online spending.

With $6.6 billion spent, Cyber Monday — the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday — was the largest U.S. shopping day ever.

Nintendo's Switch gaming console, Google's Chromecast, Roku, Hatchimals and Colleggtibles toys and Amazon's Echo speaker were Cyber Monday's top sellers, Adobe Analytics said.

Many brick-and-mortar retailers have spent heavily to move online and improve their delivery services, as people increasingly desert malls and shop online.

U.S. holiday spending across both online and physical stores rose 5.5 percent — the most in 12 years — to $691.9 billion, the National Retail Federation said on Friday.

The figures point to an improving job market and expectations of higher wages and bonuses after the recent tax bill.

Target Corp and Kohl's Corp last week reported strong holiday sales and raised their earnings forecasts as investments in e-commerce paid off.

However, department store chain Macy's Inc's holiday sales rose only modestly and the company said it would close stores and slash thousands of jobs this year.

(Reporting by Uday Sampath and Siddharth Cavale in Bengaluru; editing by Sai Sachin Ravikumar)

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