ComScore

Online holiday spending hit all-time high last week

Even though the economy is still having trouble kicking in to high gear, consumers are spending boatloads of cash on gifts this holiday season.

Between November 1 and December 18, U.S. online shoppers have spent a whopping $32 billion, jumping 15 percent compared with the same period last year, when sales hit $27.8 billion, research firm ComScore reported today. Last week's sales performance was most impressive, hitting $6.3 billion during the seven-day period ended December 18 and setting a new all-time spending record for a single week. Last year, online shoppers in the U.S. spent $… Read more

Free shipping spurs e-commerce momentum

E-commerce spending has held its Cyber Monday momentum and remains strong courtesy of free shipping deals, according to ComScore.

The research firm noted the following:

E-commerce sales are up 15 percent for the week ending Dec. 2; The last week featured three $1 billion plus days; 64 percent of transactions included free shipping.

Coming up: Great Debate: Is e-commerce killing brick and mortar?

ComScore provided the following charts:

A few observations to ponder:

ComScore’s data—along with other information from IBM’s CoreMetrics and ShopperTrak—will likely contribute to the clicks-killing-bricks argument for retail. We have a Great Debate … Read more

Cyber Monday rules U.S. commerce with $1.25B in sales

Cyber Monday officially rules the U.S. online-shopping season, racking up $1.25 billion in sales yesterday--a 22 percent increase over the previous year, according to ComScore data.

Monday's spending reflected both an 11 percent increase in the number of people shopping online and a significant jump in how much they spent. More than 10 million people bought something online yesterday, the online-marketing research firm said. Those shoppers made an average of 1.9 purchases apiece, in total worth an average of nearly $125--a 9 percent increase over per capita spending on Cyber Monday 2010.

The ComScore data differs … Read more

U.S. consumer online spending to rise 15 percent for holidays

The holidays are shaping up to be a big revenue generator for online companies, according to new research from ComScore.

According to the company, U.S. consumers will spend $37.6 billion online in the last two months of the year, up 15 percent compared to the $32.6 billion they spent last year. To put that figure into perspective, online customers in the U.S. spent $124.3 billion between January and October of this year.

ComScore has based some of its findings on the cash consumers have already spent. According to the company, between November 1 and November … Read more

Android, Samsung top U.S. mobile phone market

Android has widened its lead as the top smartphone OS in the U.S., according to the latest stats from ComScore.

For the three months ending September, Google's mobile platform grabbed 44.8 percent of the market, an increase of almost 5 points from the prior quarter. Apple's iOS retained second place with a 27.4 percent share of U.S. smartphone owners, up slightly from the previous period.

Android and iOS were the only two smartphone operating systems to gain market share.

RIM's BlackBerry took third place with 18.9 percent, a drop of almost 5 … Read more

Android widens smartphone market lead over iOS

Android has taken a more commanding lead over iOS in the U.S., research firm ComScore is reporting.

According to the company, Android secured 43.7 percent of the U.S. smartphone OS market during the three-month period ended August 2011, jumping 5.6 percentage points from the 38.1 percent market share it had at the end of May. Apple's iOS platform came in second place with 27.3 percent market share at the end of August, ComScore said. In the three-month period ended May, Apple's operating system secured 26.6 percent of the U.S. smartphone … Read more

iPhone 5: No clear winner among mobile carriers

The iPhone 5 will benefit three of the top four U.S. mobile carriers, but no clear winner is yet seen among them, according to a report by ComScore.

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and reportedly Sprint each stand to grab a healthy slice of the market demand for the new iPhone. But each carrier brings something different to the table, making it difficult to predict which one might benefit the most, says ComScore.

Facebook, Twitter see record number of visits in July

Facebook and Twitter each broke a record last month with the highest number of visitors seen by the sites, according to data released Friday by ComScore.

For the month, Facebook ranked fourth in most visited Web sites in the U.S., behind Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The popular social network had 162 million unique visitors, compared with 160 million in June and 157 million in May. And compared with 145 million in July 2010, its latest figures show a rise of more than 11 percent.

Twitter, which was ranked at No. 34, saw 32.8 million people flock to its … Read more

Amazon, eBay, Apple among top retail sites visited

Amazon was the most visited retail site in June, according to new data out today from Comscore.

Compared with all other online retailers, Amazon.com grabbed more than 282 million visitors in June, reaching 20.4 percent of the entire Internet population around the world.

Trailing in second place was eBay.com with 223.5 million visitors, or 16.2 percent of the global audience. Across the world, China's Alibaba Corporation (which includes Taobao, Alibaba.com and Alipay) saw 156.8 million people, or 11.3 percent of all Internet users, visit its sites.

In fourth place in June … Read more

Report: 6 percent of smartphone users scan QR codes

Quick response, or QR codes aren't being ignored so much after all.

Approximately 14 million U.S. mobile users in the U.S. used their smartphones to scan QR codes in the month of June 2011 alone, according to a new report from ComScore.

Here are the highlights of the majority numbers from different demographics in the survey: 14 million equates to 6.2 percent of the total U.S. mobile audience 60.5 percent of that audience was male 53.4 percent of that audience were between the ages of 18 and 34 36.1 percent of that … Read more