Heading into the holiday season, technology purchases from companies like AAPL, 005930-KS, DELL, and HPQ are likely to be hot items on many gift lists. In today’s Insight Flash, we use our CE Receipt data to examine these companies’ online direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales to see which ones are doing a better job of selling more premium products, which ones are getting better attachment rates, and which ones have typically seen a larger percentage of sales during the holiday period.
Apple’s iPhone 13 launch appears to be a big driver of its ability to increase spend per item on its site. 23 days into October, the average spend per item is $344, up over $100 from the month before. Dell has led Apple on higher spend per item since the beginning of the pandemic, but so far in October that margin has narrowed to only $11, versus twice the spend per item of HP and over three times the spend per item for Samsung. This may change moving into November and December, as HP has historically seen large spikes in spend per item for the holidays.
Spend per Item
Apple Store and HP are at the head of the pack when it comes to attachment rates, approximated by our items per transaction metric. In the first few weeks of October, HP sold an average of 1.7 items per transaction, while Apple sold 1.6. That implies that most purchases of hardware had an accessory attachment as well. Interestingly, the Apple items per transaction metric in October was down from 1.9 in August and September. This may be because the company has not yet developed the same range of accessories for the iPhone 13, implying upside as the product line develops.
Spend per Transaction
Of these four companies, Apple saw the largest percent of DTC spend over the holidays last year at 30%. It was also the only company to see an increase in November/December’s importance, up by a delta of 6%. Samsung’s percentage of sales in the holiday months was flat in 2020 at 20%, while Dell and HP both saw declines in holiday percent of sales to 23% and 22%, respectively.
Items per Order
