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Annual growth among online retailers continued to outpace the growth seen by brick-and-mortar merchants during the 2012 holiday season. In fact, year-over-year growth in both sales and transaction volume was more than three times higher among e-commerce retailers, according to our Chase Holiday Pulse, which aggregates payment processing data from 50 of the largest U.S. e-commerce merchants. Retailers experienced a continued downward trend in average ticket prices, with season-to-date prices down nearly 8 percent compared to last year. This dichotomy between a rise in sales volume and a decline in ticket prices is a pattern to watch in the year ahead.

Behind all of these numbers are three trends to follow this year.

First, the 2012 holiday shopping season was the initial year e-commerce retailers witnessed the “Online Shopping Continuum,” where typical peak shopping days — such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and even Christmas Eve, which continue to be significant moments for brick-and-mortar merchants — morphed into a week-long phenomenon. During the week following Black Friday, for instance, retailers saw strong online sales volume growth, powered by additional incentives on the days following Cyber Monday, such as time-sensitive, around-the-clock coupons and special offers. This is a continuation of the urgency mechanism that many retailers implement during key shopping days.

What had traditionally been secluded to a 24-hour period became week-long shopping, dubbed “Cyber Week.” For the seven-day period after Black Friday, the Chase Holiday Pulse revealed that year-over-year sales increased by nearly 23 percent. This could be a contributing factor to the continued decline in average ticket prices as consumers are shopping more frequently, purchasing in increments rather than in bulk, purchasing fewer or less expensive items or taking advantage of extended promotions. Interestingly, consumer spending tapered down the weekend following Cyber Week, with year-over-year sales growth rates declining by nearly 18 percent.

The Chase Holiday Pulse also reported 38 percent sales growth between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, potentially fueled by extended retailer price reductions and the rise of mobile commerce that provided more flexible real-time shopping over the weekend.

Second, we saw a rise in online sales during what the analysts called “Green Week” (Dec. 10-17), which was the busiest seven-day period of the holiday shopping season in terms of transaction volume this year. Online merchants saw high shopping volume — year-over-year sales and transaction for the same period were up nearly 11 percent and 17 percent respectively — throughout the week as responsible consumers acted to utilize free delivery offers before the holidays.

Finally, the powerful comparison shopping behavior known as “showrooming” played an outsized role thanks to the growth of the mobile smartphone. Showrooming, which is when consumers use brick-and-mortar stores to survey and compare products and then ultimately buy those products online through a phone, tablet or computer, potentially from a competitor, has pushed retailers to match online prices and enhance their in-store customer service. But there’s no reason to believe this phenomenon is a passing fad. Forty-three percent of U.S. adults admitted to participating in showrooming, according to a November 2012 poll from Harris Interactive.

The conclusion of the 2012 holiday shopping season suggests continued demand for e-commerce shopping in 2013. Continued growth in both sales and transaction volume, driven by extended periods of strong sales, the increased use of mobile technology and the emergence of showrooming, made for a record season for online retailers across the country. The aggregated power of these trends helped drive the 2012 holiday shopping season. As the online retail industry continues to grow — adapting to new technology trends and consumer behaviors — there is reason to be optimistic for a healthy economy in 2013.

Chase Paymentech, a subsidiary of J.P. Morgan Chase (JPMC), is a leading provider of payment processing and merchant acquiring. The company’s proprietary platforms enable integrated solutions for all payment types, including credit, debit, prepaid stored value and electronic check processing, as well as digital, alternative and mobile payment options. In 2011, Chase Paymentech processed 24.4 billion transactions with a value of $553.7 billion, including an estimated half of all global Internet transactions.

While the move was controversial — and still ruffles some merchants’ feathers — the fact is, it seems to be working.

In the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said, “Our core business is strong and investments in mobile and shopping this holiday season passed with flying colors. … Search performed well during Cyber Monday and Black Friday. We saw a greater proportion of queries with commercial intent.

Google offered some anecdotal evidence on how well the new business is performing, but clearly holiday shoppers did some good in boosting one of the company’s key metrics.

Arora reported that Front End Audio, which sells recording and live-sound equipment, said that sales resulting from their ads quickly made up 15 percent of the company’s revenue within weeks of launching. Further, the company reported that its click-through rates tripled and product conversions increased by 75 percent to 80 percent.

If only a portion of Google Shopping retailers are seeing those kinds of results, that could translate into meaningful ad revenue for the search giant, especially during peak times like the holidays.

During the fourth quarter, Google said its cost-per-click business increased 2 percent compared to the prior quarter, reversing a long period of declines. (The business was still down from the previous year, however.)

In a note to investors, Citi analyst Neil Doshi said he was expecting some improvements due to policy changes that Google made in regards to click arbitrage from its partner sites. He also believed that some uptick came from improvements in mobile rates.

But based on third-party research, the official October launch of Google Shopping clearly played a role.

Seattle-based Mercent, which provides retailers with tools to help them compete on Amazon and Google, said CPC rates increased to 70 cents per click on Google Shopping in December, up from roughly 55 cents in November. In June, it was less than half as much, or closer to 30 cents.

Mercent’s data is based on its customer base, which consists of 70 retailers using Google Shopping, including 1-800-Flowers, REI and Office Depot.

Indeed, Google’s efforts in the space are still in their infancy.

By its own count, it has tens of thousands of merchants participating in the platform and more than one billion products listed. Even Amazon is participating, despite it being one of the big holdouts. It buys product ads for the Kindle.

During the earnings call, analysts peppered Google’s Larry Page with questions about Google Shopping, but he mostly dodged them, especially when they were related to future product launches.

“I think that we are at the early stages of that. We just rolled out Google Shopping and we’ve seen tremendous uptake from merchants and users,” he said.

In response to a question about whether Google will enable consumers to pay or check-out within Google Shopping, Page said: “I’d expect the ease of buying things will improve over time, but I won’t comment on details. We are always focused on making our user experience better.”

Last month in an interview with AllThingsD, Sameer Samat, Google Shopping’s VP of product management, did clarify that the company has no aspirations to compete with merchants directly, even though the experience is starting to look more like a traditional e-commerce site.

“We aren’t planning on being a retailer,” he said. “We don’t view being a retailer right now as the right decision.”

Google justifies charging for Google Shopping because of the investments it has made over the past several months. It has completely overhauled the shopping experience, stressing product images over text and allowing consumers to easily conduct price comparisons across numerous sites.

The purpose of the efforts is to close the gap between it and Amazon as a starting point on the Web for shopping. Analysts estimate that 30 percent of consumers start their research on Amazon, whereas 13 percent of consumers start on Google.

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The most notable growth occurred during the last work week before Christmas, which saw an increase of 53 percent compared to 2011.

According to comScore’s top 10 days by rank, Cyber Monday still rules for online shopping — as do Mondays and Tuesdays in general.

In a memo to investors, Wells Fargo Analyst Matt Nemer wrote that, for the first time in years, Amazon is giving some customers coupons for 10 percent off this holiday. Nemer hypothesizes that there are two logical explanations for the promotion: Either the e-commerce giant is trying to get customers active again or holiday sales are tracking below expectations.

Yesterday, comScore, which tracks online spending from computers using landline broadband connections, reported that so far this holiday, spending is up 13 percent year over year, which is below its 2012 prediction of 17 percent.

Nemer also offers a plausible explanation for why sales are slow: Procrastination. “As Amazon’s base of Prime users continues to grow, customers will be more likely to delay purchases,” he wrote.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Amazon gave customers even more reasons to wait. It announced that orders can be placed through Dec. 18 and still get free delivery in time for Christmas. In particular, Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year for free two-day delivery, can wait even longer. They can place orders until 7 pm ET on Dec. 21 to receive deliveries by Dec. 24. In some cases, Amazon will offer one-, two-, or even same-day delivery for a small fee.

ComScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said there is perhaps less urgency than there once was to make those final purchases. “What we’ve seen over the past few years is a tendency for heavy spending to continue late into the week of Green Monday (Dec. 10) and right up until Free Shipping Day, which this year falls on December 17,” he said in a release.

Quirky names have been given to several days around the holidays.

“Free Shipping Day” tends to be a widely celebrated event, with dozens of e-tailers offering to cover postage during a 24-hour period. However, the prominence of the day is wearing off as more online retailers offer free shipping year-round. On “Green Monday,” which is the second Monday of December, sales reached $1.275 billion, up 13 percent over last year, according to comScore. At that level, the day ranks as the third heaviest online spending day in 2012. So far this year, spending has totaled $29.3 billion during the first 40 days of the holiday shopping season, representing a 13 percent jump over last year.

At San Francisco’s Westfield mall, PayPal tells customers that is now accepted at a handful of retailers.

While that’s lower than what comScore was originally predicting, Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s VP of Global Product, said he’s seeing no indication that sales are falling below expectations.

In general, he said, the trend is for shopping to start earlier and end later, with the peak shopping days being closer to Christmas, rather than the more prominent heavy days, like Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) or Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving).

He attributes that shift, in part, to consumers shopping on their mobile devices. ”So much of shopping is generated by promotions, but with mobile you can make a purchase whenever or wherever you are, so people are willing to wait and not change their lives around what retailers are offering,” he said.

For instance, on Dec. 2, PayPal reported its global mobile payment volume hit a new high, exceeding its record set only six days earlier on Cyber Monday. PayPal’s parent company, eBay, saw its biggest mobile shopping day on Dec. 9.

Here’s a snapshot of the weekly trends for the past four years, showing how spending ramps up as we get closer to Christmas:

Or next to nothing: IBM said social sites generated a mere .34 percent of all online sales. Referral traffic to retailers from social sites was also just about zero: IBM said Facebook only accounted for .68 percent of visits to retail sites, while Twitter had a giant goose egg.

Can’t be, right? Those are huge platforms. Surely IBM got its numbers wrong, via some sort of technical or statistical oversight.

If so, you’d think that Facebook or Twitter might want to publicly dispute those stats, since they poke a hole in their “buy our ads, use our services, and sell more stuff” pitch.

But so far neither company has said anything in public about IBM’s Black Friday numbers. Just to be sure, I checked with PR reps for both companies this week: Nada.

Instead of debating the numbers themselves, people who are sympathetic to Twitter and Facebook are making a different point: IBM is measuring the wrong thing.

Here’s the latest version of that argument, via social media analytics start-up DataSift, which says that the IBM study is “wrong,” because Twitter and Facebook “rocked Black Friday.”

But DataSift’s post doesn’t actually argue with IBM’s numbers. It just presents other numbers that show lots of people talking about stores and shopping.

It really is hard to believe that all that chatter didn’t result in more people clicking through to the stores themselves. So, perhaps future studies will figure out a more refined way of tracking that traffic, and Facebook and Twitter will have more favorable statistics to work with. Meantime, the IBM numbers are an ugly bit of coal both companies would like to ignore.

One standout measurement was the number of visitors coming to the crafts marketplace from mobile devices: It said that one-third of shoppers came from mobile, and that 30 percent of mobile visits came from tablets.

A blog post detailing the company’s holiday shopping highlights, however, did not once mention social networking, likely because there was little to share. Based on multiple third-party reports, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have contributed virtually zero in sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

A year or more ago, mobile and social commerce were consistently mentioned in the same breath as two areas of potential growth for e-commerce. But as this holiday shopping season proceeds, it is clear that the two are not equal — so far, mobile is dominating. Social networking was a #noshow.

One clear reason for the disparity is that mobile phones and tablets are simply pocket- and purse-sized computers which allow consumers to shop wherever they are. In contrast, social commerce is more complicated. Consumers may discover new products through friends, or get advice via Facebook or Twitter, but being able to track those referrals back to where they came from is not always easy.

Additionally, sales that take place directly on social networks, as is the case with Facebook Gifts, are just starting to get off the ground.

According to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, which tracks more than a million e-commerce transactions a day from 500 retailers nationwide, online sales increased 30.3 percent on Cyber Monday compared to last year. The tremendous spike was driven in part by the adoption of mobile devices.

In particular, IBM found that mobile sales reached close to 13 percent of overall transactions, increasing more than 96 percent over 2011. The iPad, specifically, generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, driving more than 7 percent of online shopping. In contrast, sales coming from social networks actually decreased 26 percent year over year, generating only 0.41 percent of all online sales on Cyber Monday.

One note worth mentioning is that IBM does not track referrals from Pinterest, which, earlier this year, was on pace to become the most significant driver of social traffic to e-commerce sites — besting mature networks like Facebook and Twitter.

A study conducted by Adobe, which did take Pinterest into account, determined that social shopping had actually doubled year over year, representing 2 percent of total visits to e-commerce sites (that’s visits, not sales). According to the Adobe Digital Index, which tracks the majority of the top 20 online retailers, including Best Buy, eBay, Target and Walmart, Facebook and Twitter accounted for 77 percent of social networking traffic on Cyber Monday, Pinterest for 15 percent (up 105 percent year over year), while other sites contributed the remaining 8 percent.

It’s possible that e-commerce sites found it more valuable to focus on Pinterest this year, which would account for IBM seeing a decrease in referrals from traditional social networks. Still, social is obviously less mature. It will take awhile for it to achieve the kind of scale retailers need to move the needle. A recent report conducted by Booz & Co. suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

The Seattle-based Web giant on Monday tapped capital markets with its first bond offering in nearly 15 years, raising $3 billion for what it said were “general corporate purposes.” Among other things, the company is set to complete the purchase of a headquarters complex for $1.16 billion by year-end.

The bond offering was Amazon’s first since May 1998, when the company was “junk” rated and offered debt at discounted rates. Amazon appears to be taking advantage of low interest rates to build its cash reserves, even as its Web site, Kindle and Web-services business continue to bring in more revenue.

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Here’s the latest to come of the pair’s improved relationship: You can now purchase iTunes credits for friends on Facebook using Gifts, the social giant’s major social gifting e-commerce initiative.

It works the same as all other purchases made through the Gifts product. Choose an item to send to a friend through Facebook (in this case, the iTunes digital gift), and you’ll pay via your credit card through Facebook. Right now, most of the options Facebook offers are physical goods like food, toys and apparel.

Lately, however, Facebook has geared up on digital gift card offerings. The company unveiled a series of new partnerships at a recent event, including subscriptions to Hulu, Pandora and Rdio. And the marquee partnership Facebook launched Gifts with was the Starbucks deal, which lets users send coffee cards to their friends via the service.

Facebook’s deep push into e-commerce appears right as holiday shopping season kicks off — it’s no coincidence that the iTunes deal is being announced on Cyber Monday — coming just before what is expected to be a banner retail sales season.

It also comes in the wake of a rather ugly season of downturn for shares of Facebook. Investors have questioned the company’s ability to generate sustainable long-term revenue from ads delivered to desktop and mobile users, and as a result, we’ve seen Facebook’s stock price slashed to around half of what it debuted at this summer. Facebook Gifts is a multi-platform initiative across the Web and mobile devices, not strictly beholden to generating revenue primarily from desktop users as is the case for the bulk of Facebook’s existing ad products.

So, does bringing Apple on as a Gifts partner actually amount to building out another meaningful revenue stream?

Perhaps, according to a little back-of-the-envelope math. Per Apple’s last 10-K, the company generated $7.5 billion from the iTunes Store during fiscal year 2012. Industry sources say that more than $2 billion of that revenue comes directly from iTunes gift cards. Sources also tell us that existing retailers who sell iTunes gift cards (like Best Buy, Target and the like) usually keep around 13 percent of each gift-card dollar sold.

So that adds up to around, say, a $260 million market size for physical iTunes cards split among participating retailers, of which Facebook will now be an active participant. That pie is small compared to Facebook’s overall revenue ($3.71 billion in 2011), but another digital product with less overhead and high demand is definitely a win for Facebook’s Gifts department. Not to mention the potential boost Facebook’s massive billion-user distribution could give on iTunes gift-card sales overall.

But the biggest takeaway here isn’t in the numbers; it’s in the fact that this deal even exists at all.

Facebook and Apple have had a long, troubled history of working together, particularly when Steve Jobs was Apple’s CEO. Perhaps the most poignant example came when the two companies failed to come to terms on integrating Ping — Apple’s doomed iTunes-based social network — with the Facebook API, due to what Jobs told us then were “onerous terms” that Facebook set forth.

With Jobs’s passing last year and Tim Cook now at the helm, initiatives like Facebook iOS and OSX integration and today’s iTunes Gifts partnership signal a new era in Facebook-Apple relations — just as Cook suggested would be the case onstage at our D: All Things Digital conference this past spring.

The relationship is no doubt still complicated. But Monday’s announcement is one step closer to peace between the two tech giants — just in time for the holidays.

Venture capitalists often tell entrepreneurs that, beyond investing, a VC can provide a lot of value by giving advice or making valuable introductions.

Here’s one I hadn’t seen before: VCs promoting their portfolio companies to friends, families and associates as places to do their holiday shopping.

First Round Capital is launching a special site today, where more than two dozen of their investments are listing holiday deals for Cyber Monday. Companies participating include One Kings Lane, Kiwi Crate, Birchbox, Dog Vacay, Warby Parker, Fab.com, Threadflip and Hotel Tonight. The offers range from free shipping to $50 or 15 percent off, depending on the kind of products and services for sale.

First Round Capital is heavily invested in e-commerce, so it knows all too well what the holidays can mean to a young company trying to grow its revenue.

This year is promising to be a monster online shopping event, with record-setting days already taking place. The day after Thanksgiving, called Black Friday, turned into an online feeding frenzy, with consumers spending $1.04 billion, an increase of 26 percent over last year. Amazon saw the most action, as was expected, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple.

If First Round Capital’s companies can capture just a slice of that discretionary spending, it could mean a couple of good months to top off the year (which leads to higher valuations and happy investors). First Round Partner Josh Kopelman wrote a brief blog post directing people to visit the site, adding that the companies “will be shipping hundreds of thousands of products this holiday season to customers all over the world.” You can bet we’ll see other partners tweeting it, Facebooking it and sending it out via email, as well (not to mention tipping off the media).

Some analysts said yes. (For the record, we at AllThingsD are dubious. But, for the moment, we’re going to pretend that not spending dough on stuff is just like spending dough on stuff.)

Andrew Lipsman, an analyst at comScore, insisted there’s little distinction between whether consumers make the transaction on the phone or whether they later go home and make a purchase on a computer.

“It’s just the introduction of mobile devices into the brick-and-mortar environment that’s affecting consumer behavior,” Lipsman said.

According to recent comScore data, 37 percent of shoppers this past quarter displayed “showrooming” behavior — the act of price-checking using a mobile device while shopping in a traditional brick-and mortar-store. That’s compared with 32 percent of showrooming shoppers in the second quarter of the year. (Note to the math-challenged: This is a small increase, given the explosive growth of smartphones over the last year.)

But Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru echoed Lipsman’s statement in a recent blog post, noting: “Most of the showrooming shoppers told us that they usually find cheaper prices online when they research them … A lot of people switch retailers when they find cheaper prices online.”

It’s apparently not all bad news for brick-and-mortar, though. As Forrester’s Mulpuru pointed out, some research leads not only to Amazon.com, but to another store. About 18 percent of mobile shoppers surveyed opted to head to another store to make a purchase, while just 15 percent said they went online instead.

Key takeaway: We’ll buy lots of stuff in lots more ways.

In what has become an annual holiday tradition, those who keep track of these things have started in on touting just how digital the holiday shopper has become, whipping out all manner of buzzwords to do so.

Last year, it was Cyber Monday — this year, it’s turned out to be Mobile Thursday. What’s next? Social Network Saturday? Self-Driving Car Sunday? (We still have Black Friday, by the way, which is today.)

And, indeed, the Mobile Thursday phrase got some big laps around the track, with numerous online shopping surveys — coming out faster than you can buy that new tablet — using it in their flash reports yesterday and today.

This year’s anecdotal meme: Apple iPads go well with pumpkin pie.

What isn’t said so much is that it is still a very small number — though fast-growing — over the last few years, with overall sales reaching $500 million for Thursday, compared to about $1.2 billion on Monday, according to comScore.

Still, for now, no one seems to break out actual mobile sales figures, which are clearly still a fraction of the totals. But they are more than happy to tell you that people are certainly browsing on their mobile devices, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is tired of talking to the relatives about three hours into the day.

According to IBM’s Benchmark report, for example, online sales were up 17.4 percent over 2011 on Thanksgiving Day, noting that “big winners were retailers who connected customers with personalized deals across multiple screens including PCs, smartphones and tablets.”

Some stats from IBM about Thursday:

Mobile Traffic: The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site reached 25.3 percent, up from 66.2 percent over 2011.

Mobile Shopping: The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase increased to 18.3 percent, up 65.3 percent from 2011.

Mobile Email: Smartphone and tablet shoppers responded to email deals from retailers, with emails opened on mobile devices jumping 23 percent on Thanksgiving Day over 2011.

Couch Commerce: In the evening hours, consumers shifted from shopping through their smartphones at the dinner table to buying through their iPad on the couch. At the end of the day the iPad drove more retail traffic than any other device with traffic reaching 10.7 percent versus the iPhone at 9.1 percent and Android at 5.8 percent.

Social Shopping: Shoppers referred from Social Networks such as Facebook and Twitter increased in evening hours generating .63 percent of all online sales on Thanksgiving.

And today, Black Friday, IBM slightly upped those figures, noting that the iPhone was the preferred device to bring into a store to shop with — presumably irritating sales clerks everywhere.

Over at Fab, CEO Jason Goldberg was touting in a Betashop blog post that his mobile app sales were 40 percent of the retail site’s total for the day. It’s usually 33 percent, so it’s a small jump, which Goldberg attributed to a tweet by Apple promoting it. But how much did he sell? He’s not saying.

And eBay said it launched 20 mobile-only e-commerce promotions over its app, as did many other retailers.

Also, no surprise, the New York Times weighed in with the classic trend piece: “The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone.” Um, everyone carries a smartphone now, but it apparently gets more magical when you take it to Macy’s.

We’ll see if Mobile Thursday becomes Mobile Holiday Season, which would be a big deal — but it’s winning so far in the pundit stakes.

Until we get actual numbers, here’s a chart about the whole thing from eBay:

In a recent survey, more than half of U.S. consumers – 53 percent — said they would begin their shopping with Amazon.

In the proprietary survey conducted by Baird Equity Research, analyst Colin Sebastian said Google will be the second-most-popular initial destination (36 percent); eBay is the third (7 percent); and then it tapers off drastically from there, with Walmart.com in fourth place (2 percent).

Beyond tradition, there’s a good reason why consumers are drawn to the classics at this time of the year. Essentially, these sites are the shopping malls of the Internet, where just about anything can be found by plugging the name of a sought-after product — like the new Wii U or the Nexus 7 tablet — into a search box, and getting immediate results.

It’s worth noting that the “other” category in the survey totals 1 percent, which is fairly significant, since spending will hit $1 billion on big shopping days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving). You can assume that a big portion of that will go toward nontraditional or boutique retailers, which aren’t focusing on search, but rather on curating a small inventory of products for people who may be having a hard time deciding what to buy. Some sites that do a really good job of this include the Daily Grommet, Fab.com, Groupon and OpenSky.

But, given that the bulk of the shopping starts with Amazon, Google and eBay, here’s a look at what each one brings to the dining-room table:

1. Amazon: The retailer benefits from the act of “showrooming.” Roughly 30 percent of smartphone users in the survey said they always or frequently compare prices of products in retail stores using a mobile device, and 75 percent are comparing prices in stores. Data from comScore suggests that mobile shoppers tend to favor apps for Amazon and eBay versus apps from particular retailers. The takeaway is that even if some people might shop in person, they could end up buying online.
2. Google Shopping: This year, Google has changed the way it accepts product feeds from retailers. Before, it was free, but now it is a paid experience. While retailers will have to budget for this change, they will be getting a lot for their money, including the ability to post large images — some in 3-D — that appear on the results page. Customers can easily sort across many sites (eBay, Wayfair, Newegg, etc.), looking for the retailer that has the best prices, free shipping and other features, like style, size or color. The results will not include Amazon’s products, however, as the company has declined to pay to play.
3. eBay: Like Amazon, it’s mobile, mobile, mobile for both eBay and its PayPal subsidiary. For all the people who don’t want to get off the couch and fight the crowds at the mall, the company is listing a variety of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals exclusively on its mobile applications. Those deals will not be found if consumers visit eBay online.
4. Walmart.com: This holiday, the mega-offline-retailer wants to be more accessible online. It has started offering customers in four markets the chance to buy and receive items on the same day, for $10. It has launched “Walmart To Go” in Northern Virginia, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, and the San Jose-San Francisco area is coming in November. No minimum orders are required. EBay has done the same thing in San Francisco, and Sebastian found in his survey that 70 percent of consumers would be willing to pay $5 to $10 for the service.

In the physical retail world, it’s the equivalent of putting up Christmas displays and piping in carols over the sound system before Thanksgiving, maybe even before Halloween.

This year, e-tailers are jumping the gun in an effort to get a bigger share of your wallet by announcing sales as much as a week before such traditionally heavy online shopping days as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (the Friday and Monday following Thanksgiving, respectively).

Two of the biggest retailers in the U.S. are exemplifying this trend with rival releases this morning:

Walmart said today that it is kicking off Cyber Week this year on Saturday, Nov. 24, and lasting through Sunday, Dec. 2. Specials will be available online and refreshed daily, with customers enjoying free shipping on more than 100,000 items. Meanwhile, Amazon said its Black Friday deals are starting today and running through Saturday. “We’re offering customers our widest selection of Black Friday Lightning Deals ever and we’re bringing doorbuster deals to shoppers earlier this year,” said Ben Hartman, Amazon’s VP of consumer electronics.

There are signs that consumers are responding to the early offers:

• PayPal, which claims to process nearly one-fifth of global e-commerce, said today that the official U.S. shopping season started as early as Sept. 30.
• Fab.com said today that sales from its 2012 holiday shopping are up 400 percent versus its holiday business this time a year ago.
• Chase Holiday Pulse data, which tracks data from 50 large e-commerce retailers, is finding that year-over-year sales volume is up 12.3 percent over 2011. Some days, like Nov. 11, were up more than 50 percent.

But many of the busiest days are yet to come. UPS is preparing for Thursday, Dec. 20, when the logistics company estimates it will deliver 28 million packages around the world, compared to its average day of 15.8 million packages. This holiday is expected to be a record-breaking year for UPS, which is forecasting that it will deliver 527 million packages between Thanksgiving and Christmas, surpassing last year’s total of 480 million.

“In the next 12 to 24 months, I think to survive and to compete against Amazon, they will have to leverage the store in a way that they thought they never could,” said Chris Saridakis, the president of GSI Commerce.

The eBay-owned company powers Web sites for such retailers as Calvin Klein, Levi’s, Sports Authority and Radio Shack. It does everything from taking pictures of the company’s inventory to coming up with marketing strategies to shipping the orders.

Saridakis said one of the big trends this holiday season is to use technology to tie together both the virtual and physical shopping experiences — something that is increasingly being referred to as “bricks and clicks.”

“One of the biggest trends this year is how do we help our clients take the inventory in the stores and connect it digitally,” he said. “What’s the best way for that local store to ship out the item instead of the distribution center? Or the best way for a consumer to pick it up, so they potentially buy more items? We are leveraging the physical store by using technology that was meant for the online site.”

Last year, he said, Toys “R” Us experimented with connecting the two channels, and more retailers, like Dick’s Sporting Goods, are implementing it this year. The efforts will be supported by advertising campaigns that will send people to buy online or have items shipped to the home from the store. Shipping from the store — and not the distribution center — has a number of benefits: It’s cheaper because the merchandise will be sent through fewer zones, but also it leverages retail employees who can put downtime to use packing and shipping items. “Thirdly, you’ve actually increased satisfaction because a customer will receive the package in a day, or two days, at the latest,” he said.

This holiday season, Chase Paymentech says, retailers are expecting 51 percent of their holiday sales to come from online, and 45 percent of the retailers are expecting to see a lift in e-commerce sales over last year. The study surveyed 178 retailers in September.

The retailers’ efforts to create a cross-channel approach come a year after Amazon launched a controversial one-day promotion that gave consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they compared prices using the online giant’s mobile phone application in a store. The idea was to encourage consumers to treat local stores as showrooms.

Saridakis said that it showed that Amazon was going to try and come up with something that will challenge the industry, and that retailers should be on alert. “It awoke a giant, and not one, but many giants,” he said. GSI mostly works with very large retailers, but in conjunction with eBay, it is trying to provide tools to small- and medium-size retailers, too. “I’m not sure how the numbers worked for [Amazon's promotion],” he said, adding that it was “a warning shot across the bow to everyone.”

Clearly, the online channel is worth fighting for. Even though it still makes up only about 10 percent of overall sales, Saridakis said, it spikes during the holidays. For most of its clients, a normal day means that 8 percent to 10 percent of revenues occur online, but on peak holidays, it will hit 16 percent to 20 percent. “Many clients do more business online on Cyber Monday or Black Friday than they do across all of their physical stores combined. Last year, we had two to three clients cross over the line, but this year we’ll have a lot more.”

But it’s not what you may think. Sales are forecast to increase because there are two additional days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, giving consumers more time to shop than they had last year.

That was the conclusion of a 15-page report written by analysts at Citi Research.

What’s more, the report said that retailers will see very little impact from people making purchases on mobile devices like phones and tablets, or on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, even though there’s a lot of hype surrounding those two areas. “While mobile and social will likely grab headlines this season, retailers should concentrate on their ‘core technologies,’ namely e-commerce nuts and bolts, and strategies that integrate their traditional stores [with online ordering and in-store pick-up],” concludes the report.

The document, which was distributed to Wall Street investors, includes data from several key industry sources, including Shop.org’s holiday outlook, ChannelAdvisor’s holiday outlook and information from Retail Systems Research.

Overall, it finds that online spending is expected to increase by 20 percent this year, which is slightly less than what the industry experienced in 2011 when it reported growth of 23 percent. In general, e-commerce continues to see significant gains as spending shifts from offline to online. Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, noted in a report last year that e-commerce in the U.S. was making up only 8 percent of overall retail.

While it indeed takes a lot for companies such as Amazon, eBay and Walmart to see an impact from changes, consumers are shifting their behavior to mobile and social, although probably not as fast as investors would like to see.

EBay is one of the most vocal companies in breaking out the impact of mobile. It told AllThingsD recently that its mobile applications have now been downloaded 100 million times. Furthermore, it is projecting sales on mobile devices to hit $10 billion, which is double what it did last year. That roughly pencils out to 16 percent of the company’s revenue, if you base the calculation off of last year’s gross merchandise volume.

In contrast, Citi cites data from Forrester Research that says smartphones will account for 3 percent of e-commerce this year, increasing to 7 percent in 2016.

Social commerce is less mature, although that’s starting to change, too. According to research conducted by Monetate, which helps Best Buy, Urban Outfitters and other clients market their Web sites, Pinterest came out of nowhere over the past year to become one of the most significant drivers of social traffic to e-commerce. In the first quarter of 2012, Facebook made up 60 percent of the social traffic to retailers, while Pinterest made up 26 percent; by the holidays, it could surpass both Facebook and Twitter.

Citi’s report quoted specific data from Booz & Co. that suggests that revenue from physical goods sold on social networks will grow by 93 percent per year in the U.S., reaching $14 billion by 2015.

Citi’s biggest piece of advice for retailers is to provide as many choices to consumers as possible. For instance, users should be able to order online and pick up items in the store; retailers should have their databases synced so that they see the same prices in the store as they do online. Perhaps one of the most surprising nuggets was that brick-and-mortar retailers shouldn’t necessarily be losing out this holiday — after all, 90 percent or more of sales still occur offline.

Although the season kicked off with a bang, there were fears that consumer confidence would fall as the end of the year approached. That did not happen, with people continuing to fill their virtual shopping carts until the very last minute; 10 individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending.

According to comScore, the final tally for online spending for the months of November and December was $37.2 billion, representing a 15 percent increase over last year.

ComScore tracks purchases made on Web sites from a fixed Internet connection, excluding spending done via mobile phones and tablets, so presumably the numbers could be higher.

While the numbers being reported sound positive, some analysts worry if they were enough to give giants like Amazon the growth rates needed to hit expectations. Wall Street analysts are expecting Amazon to post a fourth-quarter growth rate of 38 percent, which would mean it would have to be growing twice as fast as the average market.

But Chase Paymentech’s annual Cyber Holiday Pulse Index painted a rosier picture of the holiday season. Based on tracking 50 of the leading online merchants in the U.S., the report found that during the final two months of the year, transactions were up 37 percent and sales rose 25 percent.

One of the reasons for the huge gains, it said, was because Christmas fell on a Sunday this year, allowing merchants to guarantee shipping much later into the week and giving consumers more time to make online transactions.

To be sure, the increase in online shopping is coming from somewhere — most likely at the expense of traditional retail, which is expected to report a less impressive 4 percent growth rate this year.

“It’s clear that e-commerce continues to gain market share from traditional retail due to the attractiveness of the Internet’s convenience and lower prices,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Consumers were especially attracted to the deals and discounts available through digital channels -– particularly free shipping, which occurred on well over half of transactions this season.”

The most impressive finding of the season was that 10 individual days surpassed $1 billion in spending, compared to only one day in 2010.

Here is a list of the 10 biggest online shopping days in 2011, led by Cyber Monday:

(Image credit: iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

Either way, consumers barely waited until Santa got back to the North Pole before hitting up the stores again.

ComScore reports that e-commerce spending for the first 48 days of the holiday season — ended Dec. 19 — reached $32 billion, jumping 15 percent over last year. In one week alone, at least four individual days surpassed the $1 billion mark.

And IBM, which analyzes mobile shopping trends using data from 500 retailers nationwide, said shoppers continued pulling out their credit cards on Christmas Day, as they shopped for themselves after shopping for others.

IBM found that on Dec. 25, online sales grew by 16.4 percent over Christmas Day 2010. (IBM’s results do not include Amazon.com, the Internet’s largest e-tailer.)

Many of the online sessions on a retailer’s site were initiated from a mobile device, accounting for 18.3 percent of traffic, up from 8.4 percent last year. Mobile sales grew to 14.4 percent versus 5.3 percent on Christmas last year.

As stated in a report that came out earlier this week, most mobile shopping was conducted on iOS devices. The iPad led all mobile-device traffic at 7 percent, followed by iPhone at 6.4 percent and Android at 5 percent, according to IBM.

Many of the days surrounding the holidays have acquired quirky nicknames, such as Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and Green Monday (the second Monday of December).

Perhaps this Christmas will qualify as Sofa Sunday.

The term was first introduced to me by Joaquin Ruiz, the co-founder and CEO of Padopolis, which makes a catalog app for the iPad. He was hoping the Sunday after Thanksgiving would see a spike in traffic after everyone hit the mall on Black Friday and then curled up on the couch with their iPad the following Sunday to recover.

This year, Christmas Sunday’s shopping spike continued into Monday, also known as Boxing Day. IBM said that online sales were up 10 percent by midday on Monday, over Dec. 26 last year, and that mobile sales were up 13.8 percent.

(Image courtesy of iStockphoto | mattjeacock)

That’s Target’s motto this holiday season, as it promises on-time Christmas deliveries for online orders placed by Tuesday.

But some retailers are being a little more jolly.

In today’s fast-paced digital world, procrastinators are being rewarded, and will be able to shop online as late as Thursday and still get presents safely underneath the tree in time for Christmas.

For example, Wal-Mart will rush packages to your door for orders placed as late as Wednesday; Amazon is offering regular free two-day shipping as late as Wednesday; Zappos is offering free shipping for orders made by 1 pm PT on Thursday; and Toys “R” Us will go as late as noon on Thursday for express shipping.

There are exceptions, of course, and Amazon is a big one.

For orders placed on Thursday, one-day shipping will cost shoppers $3.99 an item; for items ordered on Friday, only Amazon Prime members will be able to pay $9.99 an item for on-time delivery; those in 11 U.S. cities can wait until Saturday, at which point it will cost $3.99 per item to ship by local express.

Amazon Prime is the e-commerce company’s membership service; it charges $79 a year for free two-day shipping and other perks, like free streaming videos.

One of the biggest limitations for the holiday is the logistics of getting a package from a distribution center to someone’s home. For example, FedEx won’t be running on Christmas, but will be running partial operations on Christmas Eve, a Saturday.

At this late point in the year, physical retailers shine.

For example, Apple’s shipping cutoff date is on Wednesday, but it will allow customers to order online and pick up in the store until 11 pm on Friday. On Christmas Eve, many of its stores will be open until 6 pm. Toys “R” Us and Best Buy are also offering free in-store pickup, adding late hours to accommodate the busiest of people. Best Buy will be open until 3 pm local time on Dec. 24, and Toys “R” Us will will stay open for 112 hours straight, starting at 6 am Tuesday, Dec. 20 and closing at 10 pm on Saturday night.

Online retailers can’t compete with store hours but, conversely, stores have had a hard time competing with the deals online, especially earlier in the season.

This holiday period, Amazon prompted consumers to consider the moral dilemma of shopping in stores versus online, when it kicked off a Dec. 10 promotion that offered $5 off to consumers as an inducement to walk out of stores empty-handed. EBay fired back with its own promotion, which gave online shoppers a $10 coupon to return to stores.

To be sure, online retailers will have something to celebrate on Sunday.

ComScore, which is tracking online spending habits this holiday season, said $30.9 billion had been spent online during a 46-day shopping window that ended Dec. 16, marking a 15 percent increase over last year.

Spending last Friday — dubbed Free Shipping Friday — hit $1.07 billion; it was the fourth day to surpass the billion-dollar mark this year. Still, Cyber Monday — the Monday following Thanksgiving — appears to rank as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the second consecutive season.

With only 13 days until Christmas, today has historically ranked as one of the heaviest online shopping days of the year, thereby earning the nickname “Green Monday.”

This year it’s almost a guarantee that history will repeat itself.

Already, six individual days have surpassed the billion-dollar threshold this holiday season, according to comScore. That’s up from last year, when only one day eclipsed $1 billion in spending.

The term Green Monday was coined by eBay in 2007 to describe the second Monday of December because it tended to attract shoppers who wanted to make sure their presents would arrive in time. And, well, because the color of money is green.

This year, a number of online retailers are banking on it by offering a number of holiday specials.

But one of the biggest benefactors of all is FedEx, which must ship all the orders.

The commercial postal service is predicting that today will be the busiest day in its nearly 40-year history. The company is forecasting that it will ship more than 17 million orders today, double its daily average volume, and will exceed last year’s busiest day of 15.6 million shipments.

FedEx might be one of the first indicators to reveal how well the online shopping is fairing.

It says the increase is largely driven by residential shipments sent from online and catalog retailers. ComScore’s data would agree with that hypothesis. Already, the research firm says that online shopping is up roughly 15 percent from Nov. 1 to Dec. 9, compared to the same period in 2010.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We know that Green Monday will rank among the top online spending days of the season.”

But he added that it will likely not be the last hurrah of the year.

Other important days to come include the promotional day coined “Free Shipping Day,” which occurs on Dec. 16, and other days this week as we near the end of the year.

One retailer, however, was not in the holiday spirit.

Amazon-owned Zappos put out a press release today calling itself the Anti-Green Monday. It said shoppers don’t have to get caught up in the hype because it is guaranteeing that all orders made on Dec. 22 will receive next-day delivery for Dec. 23.

Now that’s the true definition of a procrastinator.

Here is comScore’s list of the 10 biggest shopping days of 2011:

So far, three days have eclipsed the $1 billion mark, representing three of the four heaviest days in U.S. history.

In all, shopping has already reached $18.7 billion for the month of November and first two days of December, representing a 15 percent increase over 2010, according to comScore.

The measurement firm had at least one explanation for the surge. It’s not because people were less naughty. Rather, it’s because of all the discounts being offered, with the prevailing method being free shipping.

Typically, the use of free shipping peaks around the Monday after Thanksgiving, comScore said, but this year, the incentive was used at record levels over an extended period of time.

Throughout the 2011 holiday season, more than half of all transactions have included free shipping, the research firm reports. In particular, during the week of Thanksgiving, the promotion was used the heaviest with nearly 65 percent of all shoppers not having to pay freight.

During the following week, which includes Cyber Monday, the percentage of free shipping stayed high at 63 percent.

Free shipping was not used as heavily during the online shopping season last year, peaking at only 55 percent the week of Thanksgiving.

The five most visited sites the day after Thanksgiving were Amazon, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target and Apple.

While retailers such as Amazon are known for offering free shipping if you meet a certain spending threshold, clearly others are jumping on the bandwagon. For instance, Apple is offering free shipping on all purchases from its Web site until Dec. 22.

Photo Credit: thisisbossi.

In a final tally, comScore reports that $1.25 billion was spent online yesterday in the U.S. This exceeds last year’s record of $1.028 billion by 22 percent.

There was evidence early on that Cyber Monday was on track to produce record sales, with research firms releasing updates almost hourly. Others, including IBM, confirmed the strong gains reported by comScore.

The comScore figures only include purchases made from devices connected to fixed Internet connections (i.e., computers); IBM’s analysis includes mobile shopping, using data from 500 retailers nationwide that use its systems.

IBM found that online sales were up an impressive 33 percent on Cyber Monday compared to 2010, with a large majority of shoppers using mobile devices.

Though the name Cyber Monday might lead one to expect the busiest online shopping day of the year, historically that particular Monday has failed to outdo other days closer to Christmas. In fact, there’s still plenty of time this year for additional billion-dollar-plus days to come, if consumers are indeed spending more and not just looking for steep discounts.

So far, the consumer trends suggest we are headed for a strong Christmas season.

Cyber Monday followed a busy Black Friday, with comScore reporting $1 billion in online sales, a 16 percent increase over last year’s day-after-Thanksgiving shopping phenomenon. Online sales for November have already reached $15 billion, a 15 percent increase over the first 28 days of the month last year.

Those numbers don’t include commerce conducted on mobile phones and tablets, which people are using to shop during their commute or from their living room couch. IBM found that 10.8 percent of people used a mobile device yesterday to visit a retailer’s site, up from 3.9 percent in 2010. Additionally, mobile sales grew dramatically, reaching 6.6 percent versus 2.3 percent in 2010.

Mobile sales in particular were driven by Apple products, namely the iPhone and iPad, which collectively accounted for 7.4 percent of all online retail traffic. The top three devices — iPhone, iPad and Android — accounted for 4.1 percent, 3.3 percent and 3.2 percent of all online retail traffic, respectively.

The eBay-owned PayPal also reported massive mobile sales growth on Cyber Monday, with global mobile payment volume jumping 552 percent compared to the same day last year.

(Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)

Its shares closed today down nine percent, settling at $15.24 after bouncing off a new low of $14.85. That’s less than half the $31.14 that some investors paid at the stock’s high point, just after it went public in early November. More recently, it has been trading in the low to mid-$20s.

The drop is especially painful because it puts the company’s market valuation below $10 billion.

The high-flying media darling was once the talk of the town, quickly snubbing Google’s $6 billion buyout offer and then rumored to be seeking a public valuation of $25 billion.

But the Chicago-based company faced several controversies in its lead-up to the offering. It lost high-ranking executives and more than once was forced by regulators to change the way it reported its finances.

Still, on IPO day, all the fuss seemed to be over and done.

Groupon priced its shares at $20, several dollars above the expected price range of $16 to $18, and ended up raising $700 million at a valuation of close to $13 billion. That was just shy of its initial goal of raising $750 million.

Today’s stock dive during one of the headiest times of the year for shopping may show that the enthusiasm was misguided, although some of its social media peers are also trading down.

However, since its public debut, Groupon has failed to make a big splash of any kind. A major new feature, which is key to delivering relevant offers to the right consumers, was lamely supported by an amateurish YouTube video featuring two product guys. And today, the company didn’t really feature anything special for Cyber Monday except for offering discounts on a few recommended gifts. Meanwhile, its next closest competitor, LivingSocial, pulled out all the stops by offering gift cards to major online retailers, such as one from Blue Nile that gave shoppers the opportunity to spend $200 for $100.

If anyone felt today’s drop it was Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, who did not return emails seeking comment.

Mason, who was at least temporarily worth around $1.3 billion back on Nov. 4 when the company went public, is now worth somewhere closer to $715 million.

For the first time ever, so-called Cyber Monday registered as the biggest online shopping day of the year despite years of procrastinators lifting other days higher as they waited until a few days before Christmas to do their online shopping.

The theory had always been that consumers who flocked to stores on Black Friday would return to their desks on Monday to continue buying deals online.

Last year, the plan panned out and more than $1 billion-worth in items were added to virtual shopping carts across the U.S. to make it the heaviest online shopping day of the year — and the first time ever that a single day eclipsed the billion-dollar mark.

Now, with November already off to a strong start with a 15 percent increase in sales compared to the same period last year, another strong Monday could be in the works, according to comScore, which tracks online holiday spending. The research firm tracks shopping from fixed Internet connections, meaning it doesn’t count items purchased on phones or tablets.

Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — alone saw online sales of $816 million, making it the heaviest online spending day to date in 2011 and representing a 26 percent increase over the same day in 2010, comScore reported.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said, “We now turn our attention to Cyber Monday, a day that Shop.org says will see eight in ten retailers running special online promotions. Last year, Cyber Monday was the heaviest day of online spending ever, with sales exceeding $1 billion, and we fully expect to see another record set this year.”

Cyber Monday may finally be living up to its name.

Amazon is a prime example of a retailer working hard to pry open wallets today.

Last year, the largest e-commerce company said Cyber Monday was Amazon’s peak day with more than 13.7 million items ordered worldwide, setting a record for 158 items sold per second.

Today, it will be important to achieve that pace again.

On Sunday, it bought full-color circulars in newspapers around the country promoting its lineup of discounts in its special Cyber Monday store.

On the front page, it touted its full lineup of Kindle e-readers, and a couple of pages were also dedicated to sales supposedly so steep you had to go online to see the prices for electronics, cellphones and videogames.

The Cyber Monday store, however, appeared a little unorganized with random “lightning deals,” which ranged from gift baskets to knife sets, board games, power tools and inexpensive jewelry — but nothing that seemed like the hit item of the season.

Other leading retailers, including Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target, will also be expected to offer special deals.

Surely, the theory goes, if enough marketing dollars are spent, and the discounts are substantial enough, it might get consumers to turn out again to break another record.

In a blog post, comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman explained that last year’s shopping bonanza on Cyber Monday — which was first named that six years ago — was finally successful thanks to consumer awareness.

Over the past few years, it’s been steadily climbing.

In 2009, it was the second-biggest shopping day; in 2008, it ranked third. Before that, it wasn’t even close to the top. In 2006, it ranked 12th and in 2007, it ranked ninth.

“Today the majority of consumers know what it is and the attractive types of deals they can anticipate. With increased awareness comes increased participation on the part of both retailers and consumers,” he wrote.

So, now we have to wait to see if the deals — and the shoppers — both turn out, or if Cyber Monday turns out to be just another big sales day.

(Image credit: iStockphoto.com/mbortolino)