Online Shopping Pops 98 Percent Last Christmas Weekend

Online analytics firm comScore (SCOR) today released numbers for holiday online shopping activity in the U.S., and it looks as though cold weather that kept people indoors and online in some places provided one bright little sliver of hope.

Online shopping in the first 51 days of the holiday season, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 21, was $24.71 billion, reports comScore, down one percent from the prior year’s haul. Now, the weekend that just passed, Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, was down 17 percent from “the corresponding fourth weekend after Thanksgiving in 2007,” at $677 million. However, that’s a 98 percent increase from the $341 million booked during the Dec. 22 to 23 weekend of 2007, the “weekend nearest Christmas last year,” as comScore slices it.

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