Online sales in the U.S. are expected to hit another record this holiday season, but spending growth will be slower than in previous years, according to one researcher.
Forrester Research predicts that consumers will spent $89 billion shopping online during the holiday season this year, an increase of 13% from the same period a year earlier. That's down from 15% year-over-year growth in 2013.
"The expected growth is not as high as it could be due to a few unique constraints," writes Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail analyst at Forrester who wrote the report. Those constraints include a shorter holiday shopping season -- there are 28 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year -- as well as shipping constraints.
In total, Mulpuru estimates there will be more than three million shoppers who turn to ecommerce for the first time this holiday season, helping to boost online spending.
"While there are fewer new web shoppers every year — most online consumers are already shopping online — we expect 3.4 million customers to fall into the “new shopper” bucket in 2014," Mulpuru writes in the report.