Skip to main content

Final 2016 Desktop Online Holiday Sales Up 12 Percent vs. 2015

comScore reported holiday season US retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the entire November-December 2016 holiday season. For the holiday season, $63.1 billion was spent online on desktop computers, marking a 12-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

Cyber Monday (Monday, Nov. 28) once again ranked as the heaviest spending day of the year with more than $2 billion in desktop buying for the third year in a row and becoming the first day ever to eclipse $1 billion in mobile commerce.

“The 2016 online holiday shopping season had another successful year, with desktop growth rates in line with our expectations and once again far exceeding that of brick-and-mortar,” said comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni. “We also saw strong mobile commerce spending in November, with mobile’s share of total e-commerce coming in well ahead of the 20-percent mark it reached in Q3. Once December mobile commerce data is tallied, we expect spending from smartphones and tablets to lift holiday spending growth from 12 percent on desktop to within our original forecast range of 16-19 percent.”

Mr. Fulgoni continued: “Aside from the continued growth of m-commerce, another positive story from this holiday season was the way it fought back and overcame the early season malaise. Despite that initial setback, the American consumer kicked into high gear once Thanksgiving rolled around and the season saw consistent, healthy growth rates all the way through Free Shipping Day on December 16th, highlighted by a streak of 22 consecutive billion-dollar spending days on desktop. Looking back on the season as a whole, 2016 marked another year where digital – and in particular, mobile – grew its spending share and influence relative to traditional brick-and-mortar retail.”

Top 10 Desktop Spending Days in 2016 Holiday Season: Cyber Monday (Nov. 28), for the seventh consecutive year, ranked as the heaviest online buying day with $2.7 billion in desktop spending. The day after Cyber Monday ranked second for the season at $2.2 billion, followed by Black Friday (Nov. 25) with just under $2 billion and Friday, Dec. 9 with $1.7 billion. For the entire season, 30 individual days exceeded $1 billion in online spending via desktop, nearly doubling the 16 days reaching that milestone the previous year.

Hot Topic

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

Final 2016 Desktop Online Holiday Sales Up 12 Percent vs. 2015

comScore reported holiday season US retail e-commerce spending from desktop computers for the entire November-December 2016 holiday season. For the holiday season, $63.1 billion was spent online on desktop computers, marking a 12-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year.

Cyber Monday (Monday, Nov. 28) once again ranked as the heaviest spending day of the year with more than $2 billion in desktop buying for the third year in a row and becoming the first day ever to eclipse $1 billion in mobile commerce.

“The 2016 online holiday shopping season had another successful year, with desktop growth rates in line with our expectations and once again far exceeding that of brick-and-mortar,” said comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni. “We also saw strong mobile commerce spending in November, with mobile’s share of total e-commerce coming in well ahead of the 20-percent mark it reached in Q3. Once December mobile commerce data is tallied, we expect spending from smartphones and tablets to lift holiday spending growth from 12 percent on desktop to within our original forecast range of 16-19 percent.”

Mr. Fulgoni continued: “Aside from the continued growth of m-commerce, another positive story from this holiday season was the way it fought back and overcame the early season malaise. Despite that initial setback, the American consumer kicked into high gear once Thanksgiving rolled around and the season saw consistent, healthy growth rates all the way through Free Shipping Day on December 16th, highlighted by a streak of 22 consecutive billion-dollar spending days on desktop. Looking back on the season as a whole, 2016 marked another year where digital – and in particular, mobile – grew its spending share and influence relative to traditional brick-and-mortar retail.”

Top 10 Desktop Spending Days in 2016 Holiday Season: Cyber Monday (Nov. 28), for the seventh consecutive year, ranked as the heaviest online buying day with $2.7 billion in desktop spending. The day after Cyber Monday ranked second for the season at $2.2 billion, followed by Black Friday (Nov. 25) with just under $2 billion and Friday, Dec. 9 with $1.7 billion. For the entire season, 30 individual days exceeded $1 billion in online spending via desktop, nearly doubling the 16 days reaching that milestone the previous year.

Hot Topic

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...