The US holiday shopping season is on track to break sales records on the back of surging consumer confidence and increased use of mobile devices, presenting an unexpected boon for retailers and the delivery companies they rely on.
The holiday shopping season, a crucial period for retailers that can account for up to 40 per cent of annual sales, brought record-breaking online and in-store spending this year of more than $800 billion, according to Mastercard Inc.’s analytics arm.
Stakes are particularly high this year for traditional retailers that have invested heavily in technology and free delivery and returns, determined to stay relevant in a market increasingly dominated by Amazon.com.
“It has been an extremely positive holiday season in terms of sales both for brick-and-mortar and for online businesses,” said Shelley Kohan, a Retail Fellow at analytics firm RetailNext.
Preliminary numbers show that total holiday sales will exceed RetailNext’s initial forecast of a 3.8 per cent increase from last year.
“All the economic indicators were very strong and so I think consumers were more willing to open up their wallets and purses and spend more,” Kohan added.
RetailNext and most other analytics firms and industry groups – including Adobe Analytics and the National Retail Federation – are due to publish holiday sales data in January.
All the economic indicators were very strong
Mastercard said earlier this week that a late-season rally had driven an 18.1 per cent rise in online sales. Department store chain Macy’s and Target Corp. both noted increased activity during that time.
Target spokesman Joshua Thomas said that during the week before Christmas, the company had seen a marked increase in shoppers picking up online orders in stores, while Macy’s spokeswoman Blair Rosenberg said that last-minute shoppers boosted fragrance sales during that period.
Package delivery companies that handle returns for retailers have benefitted from booming delivery volumes in recent years but also have had to invest billions of dollars to upgrade and expand their networks to cope as e-commerce purchases surge to new heights.
Delivering individual packages to shoppers – and picking up returns – is a lower margin business for delivery companies, which make more when they deliver in bulk to businesses.
United Parcel Service, the world’s largest package delivery company, said on Wednesday it was on track to return a record number of packages this holiday, having handled more than one million returns to retailers daily in December.
That pace is expected to continue into early January, UPS said, and would likely peak at 1.4 million on January 3, which would be a fifth consecutive annual record, up eight per cent from this year.
Rival FedEx said it experienced another record-breaking peak shipping season but declined to provide specifics. The company’s chief marketing officer Rajesh Subramaniam told analysts last week about 15 per cent of all goods purchased online are returned, with apparel running at about 30 per cent.
UPS has worked for years to increase its ability to forecast customer shipping demands to handle major package volume spikes ahead of the holidays. It has also raised shipping rates and added 2018 peak-season surcharges.
The returns delivered in 2017 are part of the 750 million packages UPS said it expects to deliver globally during the peak shipping season from the US Thanksgiving holiday through New Year’s Eve. That means increase of nearly 40 million over the previous year.