Retailers rang up a record $91.7 billion in online sales over the holidays, an 11 percent increase on-year that barely edged out an industry forecast..
After getting off to a slow start following the election, final data from Adobe Digital Insights showed that the season's sales came in $115 million ahead of expectations, 0.13 percent better than expected.
Mobile devices raked in $28.4 billion, an increase of 23 percent over the prior year. The majority of that value came from smartphones, which generated $19.3 billion in revenue.
Of the 61 days that made up the November and December holiday shopping season, 57 were billion-dollar days, Adobe said. That included record results on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
"It's not just the total online sales figure that made this a historic holiday shopping season," Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst and director at Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement.
"This year, Black Friday set a new record by surpassing the $3 billion mark for the first time... We also saw big gains in mobile spend, with Black Friday becoming the first day in retail history to drive over $1 billion in mobile revenue."
The results, released late Wednesday, came amid some mixed data points on the season. Whereas early reads on sales from Mastercard SpendingPulse and the International Council of Shopping Centers had pointed to a better-than-expected holiday, both Macy's and Kohl's reported soft results on Wednesday.
Adobe's data measures 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers.
