It’s January, which means it’s time for us to compile reports on the holiday sales trends for small ecommerce merchants!

Continuing our trend from 2012 and 2013, we’ll start by taking at a look at how the big e-tailers fared…

The Big Store Stats

comScore is our go-to source for holiday reporting for large retailers and their 2014 numbers show a 15% increase in sales during the holiday shopping season (Nov 1 – Dec 21) between 2013 and 2014.

IBM reported similar results in their 2014 report, with a 13.9% increase over 2013.

The Small Store Stats

For our reporting, we pulled 120 stores, comparing the data collated by their ecommerce software for the 2013 and 2014 time periods.  This allows us to show changes year over year for a specific sample set.

Over the same time period as the comScore report, where the large stores increased by 15%, the small stores had a 5.49% increase in sales.

Interestingly the total number of orders was almost equal, with a drop of just -0.38%.  The number of orders (per store per day) dropped by 1 from 23 to 22, a change of -3.34%.

The increase in total sales for 2014 was due to an increase in the average order value, which went up 6.83% over 2013 to a total of $100 per order.

The product category with the highest growth was Vehicle & Parts, followed by Hardware, Sporting Goods, Electronics, then Apparel & Accessories.

More Numbers

What about Black Friday and the other major shopping days?  Don’t worry, we have that too.  If you missed it last month we have all the details for those stats, for our same group of 120 stores, here:

2014 Black Friday, Cyber Monday Stats for the Small Online Merchant

Conclusions

Small Stores Still Growing…
Even thought the big ecommerce stores have larger increases and their marketing budgets are probably larger than a small store’s gross sales for the year – the small stores still keep growing year over year.

…Especially In Certain Markets
comScore has not yet released category stats for this year, but if they are anything like last year they will show Video Games and Apparel as the top sellers.  Those categories are difficult for the small merchant to compete in, shown by the Vehicle and Hardware categories being the top among the small stores.