New York’s Mastercard says US holiday retail sales surge 3% amid online shopping boom

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On Saturday, the New York-headquartered American multinational credit card provider and financial services company, Mastercard Inc. said in a report that the US retail sales rose by 3 per cent over this year’s extended holiday sales spanning from October 11 to December 24, mostly driven by a pandemic-driven transmutation towards online shopping.

On top of that, according to the Mastercard SpendingPulse report revealed late in the day, online sales in the United States snowballed as much as 49 per cent during this year’s holiday shopping season on a year-on-year basis, while the holiday e-commerce sales alone had accounted for roughly 20 per cent of entire retail sales in 2020.

Aside from that, the Mastercard Inc. report had also added that a number of options introduced in a bid to foster contactless shopping amid a pandemic-era new-normal such as buy online and pick-up-in-store, curb-side pick-up, a substantial scale of pickup in home deliveries with a slew of US parcel service providers likes of UPS and FedEx reporting robust quarterly growth, alongside contactless technologies had been a key to success for the US retailers over the holiday season.

Nonetheless, the report had cited that the sales of luxury items such as apparel and jewellery had been slumped, but demands of home décor and home-improvement items had scaled higher amid an extended work-from-home policy.

A healthier holiday season than many had forecasted, say Mastercard

In tandem, the Mastercard report had also noted that the holiday season might have accounted for a majority of the US retailers’ annual sales, though the ongoing public health crises which had prompted many retailers such as Walmart Inc, Target Corp.

and Amazon.com Inc. to kickstart their holiday sales at least a month earlier than usual, had led to storage-associated difficulties in several stores, while a longer-than-ever holiday season for many retailers had created tens of thousands of job opportunities on a temporary basis.

Meanwhile, adding the latest boom in e-commerce sales would more likely to feather further in 2021, a senior adviser for Mastercard, Steve Sadove, said to the reporters in an interview, “This was a healthier holiday season than many had forecast. ”