Holiday 2016 Predictions - Adobe Style

Earlier in October, Adobe published their predictions for the 2016 holiday season.  With historic accuracy of 2%, it's a good set of predictions to keep in mind as you finalize your holiday e-commerce marketing efforts.

Some interesting nuggets:

• Holiday shopping continues to start earlier and earlier every year, with 31% of shoppers saying they started before November 1st -- a 5% increase from last year.
• Besides the expected sales surges on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, each and every day during the holiday season should see a whopping $1B in transactions per day. 
• Large retailers are expected to see 16.6% in year-over-year (YoY) growth during the holiday period; and smaller retailers should see 7% YoY growth.
• Whereas actual checkout is still typically conducted via websites (i.e. on a PC or laptop), up to 66% of browsing will be done on a mobile device.

What this means for retailers:

• Holiday planning should be done well ahead of Thanksgiving week.  In fact, you should have all of your plans wrapped up by end of September at the latest.
• Actual marketing tactics should begin at the start of November, latest, and continue every day throughout the holiday season
• Make sure your listings are optimized for shoppers using mobile devices.  You can look at our blog post "Mobile (is) First" for more suggestions.
• Post-holiday, measure your holiday sales strategy effectiveness against expectations -- success means you should see a 7% growth in overall holiday sales vs. last year.  

We wish all of our retailers a happy and successful holiday season!