Online sales set holiday record aided by inflation

Higher prices on a wide range of goods helped drive holiday season sales to $204.5 billion, a nine percent increase over 2021. Inflation affected the price of goods across a wide range of categories. Online revenues rose 0.8 percent from November and 3.1 percent year-over-year. “It’s definitely a key contributor to the growth but it’s not the totality of the growth,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights. “There’s a level of just innate growth happening in overall retail sales ... and we’re viewing the inflation as one of the explanatory factors.”