2012 is in the books, and a new year for online shopping has begun.

I’ve read a number of articles about big e-tailers and how they did in 2012, but not much that focuses on the small business side of things.

Here’s what we saw for small online merchants in 2012…

Big Business stats

According to a study by Chase, 2012 holiday sales were up 15.2%. Transaction volume was up 24.3%. This was for the period Oct. 29th through Dec. 25th.

comScore stated holiday sales were up 16.2% for 2012 for online stores.

Mastercard was more conservative with an 8.4% increase for 2012.

Small Ecommerce stores data

We took a look at sales for 83 stores that had data in 2011 and 2012. We looked at the time period Oct. 29th through Dec. 25th to match what the other surveys were analyzing.

For our small merchants:

• Sales were up 13.5% in 2012

• Total number of orders was up 10%

• Average order Value (AOV) was up 2.3%.

…

My conclusion?

Small merchant online sales were up in 2012, but a little less than the bigger online stores. Volume was a bit lower, but overall, 2012 looked to be better than 2011 holiday sales.

We’ll see what 2013 has in store for small merchants later this year.