Two years’ worth of growth in online shopping is expected this holiday shopping season, and these 6 stocks should reap the rewards as they rake in sales.
Holiday shopping online will skyrocket 33% this year to more than $189 billion in the U.S.
That’s according to a new report out this week from Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE). The company’s annual holiday shopping forecast is developed from data collected with Adobe’s analytics tools, which it says includes transaction data from 80 of the 100 biggest online retailers, and supplemented with a survey of more than 1,000 consumers.
According to Adobe, there could be a 42% jump in Thanksgiving Day online sales to $6 billion, a 39% jump in Black Friday sales to $10.3 billion, and a 35% rise in Cyber Monday sales to $12.7 billion. The company projects that sales will peak at around $3 billion per day from November 22 through December 3, with $2 billion per day in e-commerce sales in the first three weeks of November and between December 4 and December 18.
For comparison, last year outside of the window of Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, there were only three days where online sales reached the $3 billion level.
“It’s just incredible,” said Jason Woosley, vice president of commerce product and platform at Adobe. “If you would have asked me last year that we’d be talking about 33% [growth], I would have said you were crazy.”
Many Americans are expected to begin their holiday shopping earlier this year as the coronavirus pandemic pushes shoppers online and away from brick-and-mortar stores, with retailers like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Target (NYSE: TGT), Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Kohl’s (NYSE: KSS), Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) and Home Depot (NYSE: HD) already starting their holiday sales events and seeing a surge in online sales.
Adobe says retailers like these are taking steps to spread out their holiday deals, in part on concern about the ability of shippers to handle the increased load that rising e-commerce sales will produce. The company also said that a third of all shoppers hope to complete their holiday shopping by Black Friday, and that there will be fewer “door buster” deals on Black Friday due to store closures and to discourage crowds at stores amid the growing coronavirus pandemic.
But it’s not just big retailers that will benefit from the rise in online shopping during the holiday season. Adobe said that small retailers that bring in $10 million to $50 million in sales annually online will see a collective 107% revenue boost during the holidays, compared with an 84% jump for larger retailers that bring in more than $1 billion in e-commerce sales per year as consumers shop small with businesses that have struggled more than big national retail chains.
One thing that could slow the pace of online shopping is next week’s presidential election.
Adobe noted that online sales dropped 14% the day after the 2016 election, when President Donald Trump was elected to office, and fell 6% the day after the 2018 midterms.
Woosley said that if rising coronavirus cases around the nation don’t force closures, “and the election results actually end up taking longer than the traditional evening or the morning of the next day, then we might see a little bit of a hangover and a pause right there.”