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Christmas decorations may be put away for another year and New Year’s resolutions freshly broken, but for the retail industry, it’s a time to look back at the tech trends that defined the holiday season – with AI helping to separate consumers from even more of their cash.
Salesforce has crunched the numbers for the holiday season -– covering 1 November to 31 December – and found that consumers across the world emptied their wallets to the tune of $1.2 trillion online, up nearly 3% compared to the previous Christmas period.
Retailers have increasingly turned to AI to encourage shoppers to step up their outlay. According to Salesforce’s research, almost one-fifth of online holiday spending was driven by artificial intelligence in some way, with AI-driven product recommendations, targeted offers, and customer service chat-bots involved in $229 billion of sales. The figure represents an increase of 6% compared to the previous holiday season.
Having expanded its role in helping shoppers to make their purchases, Salesforce is predicting that retailers will also be using artificial intelligence to help consumers return them.
The company’s research found that $122 billion of the purchases made over the holiday season have already been returned to stores. According to the research, three-quarters of US shoppers said they’d be interested in having an AI agent help them to make their returns. Returns were up 28% compared to the 2023 Christmas period, and Salesforce said it expects the value of returns to grow by a further 9% this year.
As well as getting assistance from artificial intelligence, it seems shoppers are turning to social influencers for help with purchases. The research found that around 20% of holiday sales were made through social channels such as Instagram and TikTok, with 14% of traffic to online retailers originating from social media platforms.
More established platforms also found themselves with room for growth over the last holiday period. More than 80% of sales globally – over $842 billion – were “initiated by mobile devices”, Salesforce said. It added that mobile accounted for 70% of all orders, up 3% year on year.
Salesforce’s figures also shone a revealing spotlight on how many of us chose to spend last Christmas Day: reaching for our phones for a spot of retail therapy. According to the company, mobile ordering peaked on December 25, when 79% of orders were placed on mobiles – the highest percentage over the holiday period.
