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This was a very tough December for retailers, with price-conscious customers leaving it later than ever before to buy presents and do their big Christmas food shop, Andy Clarke, Asdas chief executive and president, told The Telegraph. Despite the challenging market, Mr Clarke said that people visited its stores in record numbers just ahead of Christmas, with 4.8m customers shopping in Asda stores on December 23, the chains biggest trading day so far. Online shoppers made an increasing contribution, he said, with Asdas grocery website accounting for more than 5m of sales in one day on both December 21 and .. [read more] December 22. Sales through the companys mobile apps were up over 200pc on last year. Asda, part of the worlds largest retail chain, Walmart, is launching a price war this month against its main food retailing rivals by pledging to spend 50m to reduce the price of basic shopping items such as bread, meat and cereals. Related Articles
Online retail sales up 10% for holiday shopping season
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Delivery services such as UPS and FedEx were swamped by an increase in online retail sales this holiday season. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) Sales on smartphones and tablets increased more than 46 percent, and accounted for almost 17 percent of all online sales. When given a choice of mobile devices, shoppers preferred to make the purchase on tablets, which accounted for more than double the number of sales than smartphones, according to IBM. Most mobile shoppers were using iPhones and iPads this year, because retail purchases made using Apple’s ( AAPL ) iOS were five times higher than sales on the Android operating system. Department stores saw the highest online sales growth — 63 percent — followed by home goods retailers. Clothing retailers trailed with a 10 percent increase.
comScore Reports Holiday Shopping Figures
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year ago. “Our expectations for the online holiday shopping season anticipated that consumers would spend heavily later into the season out of necessity to make up for the highly compressed holiday shopping calendar this year,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni . “Unfortunately that was not in the cards, as the final online shopping week saw considerably softer sales than anticipated, including zero billion dollar spending days although Monday and Tuesday came close.” Added Fulgoni, “Strong momentum coming out of Thanksgiving , in addition to heavy weekend buying, suggested we would meet or exceed expectations as long as momentum continued through the final week before Christmas. Unfortunately, the most recent week fell short of those expectations, and it looks like the final season growth rate will end up a few percentage points shy of what we had anticipated. In the end, I think we’ll look back at this online holiday season as one where absolute dollar sales gains in consumer spending were held back by heavy retailer price discounting that occurred in an attempt to stimulate consumer demand, while at the same time, consumers weren’t willing or able to increase their spending rate to fully compensate for the six-day shorter shopping period between Thanksgiving In a release, the company noted report details: Top 5 Gaining Product Categories for Holiday Season-to-Date For the holiday season-to-date, Video Game Consoles & Accessories ranked as the top-gaining product category vs. year ago, followed by Apparel & Accessories, Consumer Electronics (bolstered by smartphone sales), Computer Hardware (bolstered by tablet sales), and Home & Garden.