As holiday sales snowballed online, so did out-of-stock messages

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US shoppers saw more out-of-stock messages this past holiday season than in previous years, per an Adobe index that tracks this activity. The index rose to 4.0 during the 2021 season, when US ecommerce consumers received more than 6 billion out-of-stock messages. That’s about an 8% increase year over year and a 264% jump from the pre-pandemic 2019 season.

Beyond the chart: Some of the increase in out-of-stock messages may be due to the ecommerce surge, with US holiday shoppers spending about $72 billion more online in 2021 than in 2019, according to our estimates. That said, supply chain disruptions have likely played a role in raising the rates of these messages.

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