Salesforce released its annual Cyber Week (November 23-29) report, which analyses shopping data from over one billion shoppers on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform and activity across commerce, marketing, and service. Overall, 2021 global online sales hit an all-time high of $275 billion, up 2 percent compared to 2020.
The data shows that digital patterns established during the pandemic are still a force this holiday season, with strong early November growth driven by consumers who were not deterred by higher prices, lower discounts, and decreased product inventory. Cyber Week itself saw muted growth as a result of these early-season shoppers working ahead of the traditional shopping peak.
Top shopping insights, as per Salesforce, are:
The major digital holiday shopping period is over: Holiday shopping began in earnest at the start of the season with consumers spending $74 billion over the first three weeks of November (up 10 percent YoY) and $297 billion globally (up 5 percent YoY). The largest single shopping day over Cyber Week was Black Friday (up 2 percent YoY global) as holiday demand was smoothed out across the entire month of November.
Consumers find high prices and fewer discounts: Holiday inflation, coupled with lower discounts, meant deals were harder to find this year. Over Cyber Week, the Average Selling Price (ASP) was up 11% in the US and 5% globally compared to last year. Meanwhile, the average discount over Cyber Week was 24% globally (down 8%).
Holiday supply chain crunch leaves shoppers with fewer gift options: Early and persistent supply chain issues meant digital shelves weren’t as well-stocked as in years past. Product catalogues (number of products being sold) over Cyber Week shrank 5% globally compared to last year.
Holiday inflation leads to holiday financing: With higher prices and fewer discounts, shoppers embraced Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) offerings. Globally, BNPL usage over Cyber Week grew 29% YoY (8% of all orders) with over $22 billion in holiday orders financed. On Black Friday, 7% of global orders and were paid for with BNPL.
Consumers favour stores with order online, curbside pickup services: Consumers continued to prioritise health, safety, convenience, and trust this Cyber Week.
Rob Garf, VP and GM of Retail, Salesforce, commented: “While online sales levelled off over Cyber Week compared to the holiday surge we experienced during the pandemic, digital shoppers drove significant sales for the first few weeks of November and maintained the high Cyber Week baseline they established in 2020.
“Consumers entered into this holiday season aware of supply chain bottlenecks and inflation and shopped early and often to smooth out the demand we usually see concentrated over one week.”
To help retailers and brands benchmark holiday performance, Salesforce analyses aggregated data to produce holiday insights from the activity of over a billion global shoppers across more than 54 countries powered by Commerce Cloud, in addition to Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud data from retailers. Salesforce’s holiday data set includes 24 of the top 30 US online retailers on the 2021 Digital Commerce 360 list and utilises publicly available third-party data sources.
To qualify for inclusion in the analysis set, a digital commerce site must have transacted throughout the analysis period, in this case October 1, 2019 through November 29, 2021, and met a monthly minimum visit threshold. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure consistent metric calculation.
