Just a few weeks before the start of the period with the biggest shopping surge of the year, PayPal analysts predict that 2016 could see an impressive boom in e‑commerce for the e‑trade industry.
During the holiday season, people will make an increased number of purchases: including those made via mobile devices. According to PayPal estimates, the largest mobile transaction during the 2016 Christmas season will exceed $64,000.
An increase in mobile shopping is also expected in Greece: according to research by PayPal and GfK[1], 66% of active internet users already use mobile devices to make online purchases.
On the recently established Cyber Monday alone, the Monday dedicated to online deals specifically for technology products (this year that day falls on November 28), PayPal expects payment volume to exceed $25,000 per second. By comparison, PayPal typically records payment volume of about $10,900 per second on regular business days in stores. Last year, Cyber Monday saw the highest number of transactions made in a single day in PayPal's history, processing more than 450 payments per second.
Based on PayPal’s forecasts, the most popular categories for holiday shopping in 2016 will include electronics, apparel and auto parts. PayPal also expects at least 17 million P2P (person-to-person) transactions to occur in December 2016, specifically related to sharing the cost of buying gifts or transferring money between friends and family.
Additionally, we can expect that the numbers for online financial support in the period before Christmas can be extremely interesting, due to the increased popularity of online donations.
PayPal charitable giving in 2015 raised over $ 857 million for 250,000 nonprofits and foundations, engaging over 7 million users across 183 markets. $ 45.8 million was spent on PayPal donations on #GivingTuesday in 2015. This charitable act even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest amount of money raised for charity in a single day.
PayPal expects to see an increase in online donations again in 2016, and the payments that will be made for charitable purposes via mobile devices will increase by 45%.
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[1] On PayPal’s behalf, GfK interviewed a representative quota sample of 1,000 internet users (aged 18 – 65) across Poland who own and/or use an internet-enabled device. The survey was conducted in June 2016, using an online questionnaire (Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing – CAWI). The structure of the sample was adjusted by controlling the age / gender quotas to match the structure of Polish internet users in terms of gender and age.
