Last month we reviewed the 2016 Black Friday & Cyber Monday Stats so now we’re going to review the whole shopping season. This is our fourth year reviewing the season and as always we like to compare our small stores to some larger merchants.

Large Stores – Holiday Shopping Season

This year we’re looking at reports from Adobe Digital Index and ComScore, who both used a date range of Nov 1st – Dec 31st for their reports:

Adobe Digital Index:

• Revenue up 11% over 2015

ComScore:

• Revenue up 12% over 2015

Small Stores – How Did They Do?

We used data from 167 stores, comparing their stats for the 2015 and 2016 holiday seasons. This allows us to show changes year over year for a specific sample set:

• Revenue up 4% over 2015
• Orders up 2% over 2015
• Average Order Value up 2% over 2015

What we find interesting when comparing these stats to just the Thanksgiving weekend, is that these same small stores saw only a 0.89% increase on Cyber Monday, and even had drop of 3% on Black Friday compared to 2015, but overall for the season they were up 4%.

What does this tell us?  Maybe the small stores are having fewer Thanksgiving sales then they used to, or they are running longer specials for the season instead of focusing on the days that are popular for the large merchants.

While we can see sales stats, we don’t know what promotions are being run, or if customers are just spreading their shopping out over the season.  What we can see though is that our small stores continue to improve their sales year over year.