Commentary

Average Order Value Online Rises During 2017 Holiday Season

Data released Thursday shows an increase of average order value online during the 2017 holiday season.

Overall, U.S. ecommerce holiday sales rose 13% from the previous year, up from 10.43% in 2016, according to data from NetElixir.

The most compelling is the increase in average order value, which rose 19.4% during the 2017 holiday season.

NetElixir’s 2017 holiday season ecommerce analysis aggregates holiday traffic data of 400 million ecommerce website visits across the company's client base. The analysis ran from Thanksgiving Day until Christmas Day in 2017. The search marketing data was extracted from AdWords, Bing and Yahoo Gemini platforms, while sales data was pulled directly from the ecommerce websites.

Mobile visits to ecommerce sites rose sharply, but sales saw modest gains, with the most impact in the cosmetics category of 11%. The apparel category rose 2%, while gifting rose 3%. Food and gourmet categories saw a 1% dip in mobile commerce sales.

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The apparel industry saw the biggest gains in terms of visits to websites from mobile devices, up 32% for mobile visits. All other categories saw single-digit increases, suggesting that shoppers used mobile devices more for browsing, searching and product research.

NetElixir also analyzed the ecommerce sales data by U.S. regions and found the highest increase in the South, with a 24.3% increase. The next-highest was found in the West, with 12.7%, then in the central U.S. with 12.2% and then the northeast with 11.4%.

Search marketing trends were also tracked in the report. Average order values (AOV) saw the biggest lift this year, with an increase of 19.4%. Conversions increased by 15.6%, impressions increased by 12.8% and the average cost-per-click went up by 14.2%. 

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