In the 2021 holiday season, retailers and shoppers showed there was no going back to the pre-pandemic state. As in 2020, consumers went online to buy merchandise they otherwise might have purchased from store shelves.
Retailers that already adopted the omnichannel model ramped up their efforts by expanding services like curbside pickup and same-day delivery to new locations. At some retailers, shoppers ordered on the web for pickup and delivery at rates even higher than in 2020. Other retailers deployed omnichannel services for the first time.
Analysis of U.S. online retail data and performance in 2022. Includes over 75 charts, forecasts for 2022 holiday sales, online penetration and offline sales, the fastest-growing categories in ecommerce, and a projection of the top online retailers in 2023.
The pandemic was not the only challenge retailers and their customers faced in 2021. Global supply chains were a mess during the year, leading to out-of-stock merchandise and the possibility that last-minute shoppers wouldn’t find what they wanted.
Consumers got the message and acted accordingly, says Lewis Broadnax, vice president of digital and ecommerce at Sazerac, the parent company of more than 450 liquor brands.
“Consumers understood the supply chain issues being seen across all industries. We saw higher demand for shipping promotions early in the buying season. We saw a lower demand for expedited shipping as consumers completed their shopping earlier in December,” Broadnax says.
A Sazerac spokeswoman said it was too soon to talk about other trends during the 2021 holiday period.
Sazerac’s experience with early holiday shopping was not an isolated case. Data from Adobe Analytics indicates early shopping was so widespread that it took the edge off one of the most important shopping periods of the year.
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