ComScore: Online Spending by PC up 15% Since Nov. 1, With $5 Billion Yet to Come for ‘14

Just going by the headlines, you’d think mobile is the prime mover in the payments business. But desktop PCs still dominate online sales, and for the holiday-shopping season they’ve been ringing like cash registers.

Since the official start of the season on Nov. 1, consumers using PCs have registered $48.3 billion in online orders, up 15% from the same period last year. For the seven days through Sunday, the last full week of shopping before Christmas, sales totaled $5.8 billion, an 18% increase.

That’s according to a report posted Tuesday by comScore Inc., a Reston, Va.-based research firm.

Spending on Thursday, the so-called Free Shipping Day, totaled $926 million, up 7% from the same day in 2013. This is a promotion in which many online retailers offer customers free delivery before Christmas. But Free Shipping Day was exceeded by the $1.16 billion compiled on Tuesday and the $1.07 billion spent on Monday, according to comScore.

The biggest percentage increases posted by PC users came around Thanksgiving, the figures show. The day itself saw a 32% jump in sales, to just over $1 billion, while the next day, Black Friday, recorded a 26% increase to $1.5 billion.  The entire period bookended by Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, meanwhile, posted a 24% year-over-year increase to $6.56 billion, the comScore report shows.

These increases indicate a more robust economy and a healthier consumer-spending market, the research firm says. They “should be taken as a very positive sign for the economic health of both the American consumer and the e-commerce channel as a whole,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman emeritus at comScore, in a statement.

Of course, the year isn’t quite over yet, and even though the big days are past, online merchants can expect the flood of spending to continue. On desktops, Fulgoni predicted, “there is still about another $5 billion that will be spent over the balance of the year that will get us to new all-time highs for e-commerce.”