Online retail was the holiday season’s big winner, MasterCard says

Online retailers were the big winners this holiday season, as their sales grew significantly faster than those at stores, according to the MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse report released today.

E-commerce sales were up 15.5% over last year for the period Nov. 1-Dec. 24, and 18% since the Friday after Thanksgiving, says the report from MasterCard Advisors, the consulting arm of MasterCard Inc. Overall, retail sales increased 3.6% during the period, a substantial improvement from a 2.3% drop-off during the 2008 holiday season, MasterCard says.

The e-retail segment registered double-digit growth in all but one week during this holiday season, MasterCard says. Several major winter storms that kept shoppers from bricks-and-mortar stores seem to have boosted online sales, says Michael McNamara, vice president of research and analysis for SpendingPulse.

MasterCard’s growth estimates for e-commerce this holiday season have been consistently higher than those of web measurement firm comScore Inc., with comScore most recently estimating 4% growth in online retail sales for the season. MasterCard has said its estimates typically track those of larger retailers, and reports from comScore and others suggest that bigger e-retailers gained market share during the 2009 holiday season.

MasterCard’s SpendingPulse estimates come from credit and debit card activity in the MasterCard network and survey data about other kinds of payments, such as cash and checks; comScore tracks the actual online activity of several hundred thousand U.S. consumers as the basis for its estimates.

Of the other nine SpendingPulse sectors, other than e-commerce, five registered gains over last year, helped by an extra shopping day this year during the peak shopping period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Without that extra day, results in each sector could have been 2-4% lower, MasterCard says.

“Overall this year, we have seen increasing stability in spending, as opposed to the free fall of 2008,” McNamara says. “This is especially significant considering that prices have been holding up this season, without the broad emergency discounting that consumers benefited from during the 2008 holiday season.”

He notes that heavy discounting during the 2008 holiday season shifted sales into November last year, while this year holiday shopping only began to take off the day after Thanksgiving. “That shift in sales patterns is one of the factors that made November of this year look weak, and December look stronger,” he says.

MasterCard SpendingPulse reported today results for eight of the 10 sectors it covers. For the period Nov. 1-Dec. 24 versus the comparable period a year ago, SpendingPulse estimates: