Adobe releases data on early holiday shopping and prices

Consumer online spending jumped in October, while overall online prices continued to decline, according to reports from the Adobe Digital Price Index and Adobe Analytics.

Driven in part by generous discounts, especially in electronics and toys, economic pressures did not depress consumer online spending YoY.

Spending as discounts kick in. Consumers went on a $72 billion online spree in the month of October, an increase of around 11% on September but on par with October 2021. This despite inflation and talk of a recession. Adobe Analytics bases the data on one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories.

With the expectation that consumers would shop early this year (not least because of supply chain and delivery concerns), many online retailers offered discounts in advance of the upcoming major shopping holidays. Consumers have seen discounts of 17% for electronics generally and 10% for computers.

Prices fall again. Although ecommerce prices were up 0.3% month on month, they were down 0.7% YoY. This was driven in part by decreased prices for electronics and toys; indeed a sharp 12.9% YoY drop in electronics prices is the largest seen for the category since Adobe started tracking online prices in 2014.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in the current economic environment, food prices showed a notable YoY rise (14%), but this did reflect a very slight slowing following last months record YoY increase of 14.3%.

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Why we care. It’s surely too late to make marketing decisions for this holiday season, but it’s fascinating to sit back and see what happens. Adobe’s huge stack of data offers a good vantage point for doing so.

What jumps out is that multiple online categories are resisting economic pressures to push prices higher. Food is the glaring exception. Of course, you can’t buy gas online. Can you?