Holiday Mobile Payments Predicted To Grow 47%, With All E-Commerce Up 14%

Powered by growth in mobile payments, so-called digital commerce for 2015’s holiday season will grow 14.3% to $70.1 billion from last season’s $61.3 billion, Internet metrics firm comScore Inc. predicted Wednesday.

Reston, Va.-based comScore defines digital commerce to include desktop e-commerce and mobile commerce. The firm predicts desktop e-commerce for November and December will hit $58.3 billion, up 9.4% from $53.3 billion in the same year-earlier period.

Holiday-season mobile commerce will grow five times faster, totaling $11.7 billion versus $7.98 billion last year for an increase of 47.2%, comScore says. Mobile thus would account for 16.8% of 2015’s holiday digital commerce versus 13% in 2014.

The digital-commerce boom is good news for merchant acquirers since most volume ultimately is charged to credit and debit card accounts, leading to revenue-generating transactions.

“The 2015 online holiday shopping season is expected to surpass $70 billion in spending, representing a year-over-year growth rate of 14% across desktop, smart phones and tablets, and once again far outpacing the growth of brick-and-mortar retail during the most important stretch of the year for retailers,” Gian Fulgoni, executive chairman emeritus of comScore, said in a statement. “Although we anticipate a marginal slowdown in the digital-commerce growth rate from last year’s 15% level, the overall economic outlook is positive, which bodes well for consumers and retailers.”

As Fulgoni noted, digital commerce, even though different entities may measure it somewhat differently, continues to grow far faster than in-store sales. New York City-based securities rating agency Fitch Ratings predicts that in-store sales will grow only 1.5% to 2% in 2016 versus 3% to 4% for overall retail sales.

And last week, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated total seasonally adjusted retail sales for the third quarter at $1.18 trillion, up just 1.6% from a year earlier. E-commerce sales, however, grew 15.1% to $87.5 billion and accounted for a record 7.4% of all retail volume.