The 2024 holiday season marks NetElixir’s 17th annual holiday forecast. A foundation of our forecast is our ecommerce holiday calendar, which details the expected online sales volume of crucial days throughout the holiday season. Marketers can use this calendar as a resource to know when their customers are more likely to be active online. This year is especially crucial as it is one of the shortest holiday shopping windows in recent memory, with only 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
What We Learned From The 2023 Holiday Season
Key e-commerce trends from the 2023 holiday season include:
- Deal-driven shopping behavior intensified: Shoppers acted fast to grab time-sensitive discounts, leading to reduced latency (the time between landing on a website and making a purchase) and an increase in cart sizes. Platforms like Amazon capitalized on this with lightning deals.
- AI-driven ad solutions gained momentum: Performance Max (Pmax) campaigns increased their share of paid search orders by 10% compared to last year, with AI-powered campaigns projected to drive over 80% of paid media orders by 2025.
- Category shifts in performance: Categories like Beauty & Cosmetics and Fashion & Apparel saw strong order growth (+22% and +18%, respectively), but both categories experienced drops in AOV (-8% and -16%).
- AI-powered shopping is on the rise: With chatbot-led shopping becoming more important, AI is set to further transform retail by personalizing and enhancing the shopping experience this holiday season.
Methodology Behind Our E-Commerce Forecast
We aggregate and analyze weekly data of website visits, website sales, channel-wise investments, and CPC data across different retail industries within our dataset. We track this data throughout the year, segregating based on device and compare it to the previous years’ week-wise key metrics. Using our proprietary AI-powered customer intelligence platform, LXRInsights, to track and analyze the real-time weekly data.
