Mastercard: Holiday Shoppers Chase Value as Online Spending Jumps 6.7%

28% of US Consumers Shopped Only Online on Black Friday

This year, the holiday shopping season belonged to digitally savvy consumers.

New data from Mastercard showed that while total retail sales from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 rose 3.8%, online shopping was up 6.7%, according to a Thursday (Dec. 26) press release. Those figures, from Mastercard SpendingPulse, are not adjusted for inflation.

“The holiday shopping season revealed a consumer who is willing and able to spend but driven by a search for value as can be seen by concentrated eCommerce spending during the biggest promotional periods,” Michelle Meyer, chief economist for the Mastercard Economics Institute, said in the release. “Solid spending during this holiday season underscores the strength we observed from the consumer all year, supported by the healthy labor market and household wealth gains.”

Consumers looked for values “at every turn” during the season, responding to sales throughout November and the Black Friday period, the release said. The last five days of the season saw 10% of all the holiday spending.

Mastercard also found demand for experiences such as dining out on the rise, with restaurant spending up 6.3%, per the release.

The company’s findings on eCommerce spending were in keeping with preliminary insights from rival Visa released earlier this week. That data showed total retail spending in stores up 4.1% this year, while online shopping increased 7.1%.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS examined the importance of optimizing the payment process for online shopping via pre-purchase testing in a conversation this week with Quantum Metric Vice President of Banking, Financial Services and Insurance Mike Hanson. He said the rise of payment testing among consumers is reconfiguring the retail world.

“Payment testing has become mission critical for any retailer that wants to drive an impact on customer experience and brand loyalty,” Hanson said, adding the average consumer now visits a page two to three times before making a purchase. “Retailers who ensure that their checkout pages are optimized ahead of peak sales will see the best conversion rates and customer satisfaction scores.”

Pre-purchase testing also establishes trust by giving customers the certainty that transactions will be carried out smoothly, Hanson said, particularly during the holiday season.

Consumers will abandon carts if their preferred method of payment isn’t offered. Research by PYMNTS Intelligence found that 70% of shoppers determine where they’ll shop online based largely on the payment options provided.


Treasury Secretary: DOGE Has Found $50 Billion in Savings 

Treasury Department

The U.S. Treasury Secretary says a new government cost-cutting effort has found $50 billion in savings.

Speaking to Fox News Tuesday (Feb. 18) evening, Scott Bessent said the work by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a group created by executive order last month, could ultimately lead to “several percent of GDP that we are saving.”

The secretary added that the public doesn’t “have to be concerned about any of this,” in reference to attempts by the Elon Musk-connected team to access taxpayer data, leading Democratic lawmakers to raise concerns about privacy.

At the Internal Revenue Service, Bessent said, there’s one member of the DOGE team “looking at an outdated IT system, that’s all they’re doing.”

Bessent said two people at Treasury had “read only access” to the payments systems, meaning they don’t have the ability to make any changes.  “There are very strict guardrails around them,” he said.

The $50 billion figure is slightly lower than the $55 billion in savings DOGE claims to have found so far. However, a report from Bloomberg News Wednesday (Feb. 19) notes that while DOGE says it has saved $55 billion, its website accounts for just $16.6 billion.

That site also includes an error, the report added, mislabeling an $8 million contract as $8 billion, reducing the amount of the group’s itemized savings by nearly half.

DOGE’s efforts have helped bring about hundreds of thousands of government layoffs, some of which have been rescinded as departments realized they were missing crucial workers. 

For example, the mass firings led to the dismissal of a team in the U.S. Department of Agriculture working on the government’s response to the avian flu. The department has said it is now trying to reverse the firings.

In another incident last week, the National Nuclear Security Administration rescinded firings for employees responsible for monitoring the nation’s nuclear stockpile, only to discover it had no way of getting in touch with said employees.

The idea for DOGE was first floated last year, with President Donald Trump announcing that Musk would lead the project. However, the administration has since said that Musk was an advisor to the White House, and not in charge of the department.

In a recent interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Amias Gerety, a Treasury official for the Obama administration, warned of the consequences if DOGE’s efforts to access payment systems created uncertainty.

“If there’s one phrase that dominates discussions about the Treasury’s role in the nation’s finances, it’s ‘full faith and credit,’” Gerety said.

“The full faith and credit of the U.S. government should not be impeached. It’s literally in the [Constitution]. If you’re a bank, if you’re an investor, if you’re a government contractor, if you’re a retiree receiving Social Security — you have to ask, will my payments go through? That uncertainty should be felt around the world.”