Online holiday spending in the US is close to $27 billion so far

It appears that this year the economy in the United States has made a turnaround. Last year, shopping during the holiday shopping season was down compared to other years. This year holiday shopping is turning around and according to comScore online spending has now approached $27 billion for the first 37 days of the November-December shopping season.

That amount of money is a 13% increase over last year. The exact amount spent for holiday online shopping for the first 37 days of the 2012 holiday shopping season is $26.6 billion. Three recent days of the shopping season so far have seen over $1 billion spent online including Monday, December 3, Tuesday, December 4, and Wednesday, December 5.

Those three days saw online shoppers spent $1.117 billion, $1.362 billion, and $1.051 billion respectively. There have been a total of seven days the shopping season with online spending reaching over $1 billion. Online shopping is a big challenge for traditional retail sellers with more and more shoppers going into retail stores to look at products and then buying online.

This phenomenon is called showrooming. One major retailer, Best Buy, is attempting to fight showrooming during the holiday shopping season by offering Internet price matching in its stores. Today is known as Green Monday, and comScore predicts that today will be one of the heaviest online spending days of the year and the lead up to what is expected to be the biggest online shopping week of the year.