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RAPAPORT... U.S. ecommerce spending from desktop computers for the first 24 days of November jumped 14 percent year on year to $18.912 billion, which is in line with comScore Inc.'s forecast for the period. November 19 was the heaviest online shopping day so far, registering $963 million in online retail sales.  Andrew Lipsman, comScore's vice president of marketing and insights, said, “The heaviest online spending day, thus far, fell just shy of $1 billion in sales and though we’ve not yet reached that benchmark we can expect to see that spending threshold eclipsed numerous times during the post-Thanksgiving period. Black Friday and Cyber Monday can both be expected to easily surpass that total, with Cyber Monday already beginning to point toward $2 billion.” For the whole Christmas spending season, which comScore defined as November 1 to December 29, the group anticipates that online retail sales will increase by 14 percent year on year to $48.1 billion. Online retail sales from a mobile device, which comScore began to track this year, are expected to reach an additional $7.1 billion. “While the early part of the online holiday shopping season has been solid so far, we are tempering our expectations given the shortened 26-day shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year,” added Lipsman. “In addition, with Hannukah beginning in November this year there is some spending that has been pulled forward and likely added a boost to the early November shopping period. That said, our forecast of 14 percent growth for desktop-based buying still represents a strong outlook versus last year that highlights the continued channel shift to online. We also expect mobile-device commerce spending growth to contribute about 2 percentage points to that growth rate, meaning that total digital commerce will grow at a rate of nearly 16 percent.”
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