The holiday season is a time when we know consumers are spending. Almost every year holiday retail sales are predicted to outperform any previous season. Online and mobile won the holidays in 2017. eMarketer reports that US retail ecommerce sales jumped 17.8% during the 2017 holiday season, a big increase that helped push total retail sales up 5.5% in November and December. They originally expected ecommerce to climb 15.8% and total retail growth to slow to 2.0%. (1)
Gen Z represents nearly $50 billion in spending power and the size of the group’s influence will grow. Already, Gen Z is larger than the Baby Boomers and Millennials in terms of population size. Growing up with constantly connected mobile devices, it was expected that this generation would fully embrace online shopping as standard practice along with dire predictions for brick-and-mortar sales. Just a few years ago, we would have predicted a dropoff in Black Friday in-store sales as younger people spending money started shifting their dollars online. Instead, we’re seeing more subtle changes in shopping behavior. They do research online before making a purchase, but they actually prefer in-store shopping to a greater extent than Millennials do. They are less likely to use PCs and more likely to use mobile devices where the shopping experience is much more limited. When it comes to Black Friday vs Cyber Monday shopping, this year younger shoppers will still prefer going to physical stores.
