Harrison’s Mastercard says US holiday retail sales rise 8.5% as online shopping boom



by   |  VIEW 1518

Harrison’s Mastercard says US holiday retail sales rise 8.5% as online shopping boom

Mastercard Inc., the Harrison, New York-headquartered American multinational credit card giant and cross-border payment processing industry Goliath, said in a report on Sunday that US retail sales jumped as much as 8.5 per cent between November 1 and December 24, mostly turbocharged by a tantalizing gain in e-commerce sales.

On top of that, Mastercard Inc’s SpendingPulse report had unmasked late in the day that US e-commerce sales climbed 11.0 per cent on a year-on-year basis during 2021 holiday season, underlining a pandemic-driven sustenance in consumers’ behavior to spend more online.

Besides, as the United States had been facing off a flurry of new pandemic cases despite this year’s milder winter weather, mostly due to an upsurge in community transmission alongside a newly identified Omicron variant which had reportedly topped delta cases in the world’s No 1 economy, Americans appeared to have decided to swamp e-commerce sites, eventually leading to a meteoric upsurge in e-commerce sale.

Nonetheless, shoppers had flocked brick-and-mortar retailers earlier in November and began their holiday shopping earlier-than-usual over frets that a lingering supply chain bottleneck coupled with a stabbing rise in inflation indicators would shore up prices late in the year.

US holiday sales rise 11 per cent in 2021

In tandem, holiday e-commerce shopping accounted for a roughly 20.9 per cent of entire retail sales this year, the Mastercard Inc survey report had unveiled, while jewelry sales surged 32 per cent and sales of electronic goods jumped 16.2 per cent compared to the same time a year earlier.

Meanwhile, addressing to a ballooning US holiday sales this year which is expected to notch a new record, a senior advisor for Mastercard Steve Sadove said in a statement, “Shoppers were eager to secure their gifts ahead of the retail rush, with conversations surrounding supply chain and labor supply issues sending consumers online and to stores in droves”.