Christmas shopping: credit card payments are on the rise

The number of Italian consumers who have decided to pay for Christmas gifts by credit card is growing. They were 123 million the payments with debit cards, credit cards and prepaid cards in the week of Christmas, compared to 92 million in the same period last year. This leads to an increase in the 33.7% compared to the previous year.

The data relates to transactions managed by SIA, a company that manages approximately half of the payment transactions with debit card, credit card and prepaid cards in Italy.

101.5 million relate to payments in traditional shops, equal to almost 82.5% of the total, in growth of 31.8% compared to 2018. Payment transactions for Online shopping were instead 21.5 million, equal to 17.5% of the total, in 43.3% increase compared to the same period of the previous year.

Overall, in the period from 1 December to 24 December 2019, there were 366 million card transactions, an increase of 31.7% compared to 278 million in the same period last year.
In particular, over 78% of total card payments concerned traditional shops for a total of 286 million transactions (+ 28.3% compared to the same period in 2018). More evident, however, is the increase in purchases on e-commerce sites (+ 45.5%).

It should be noted that the peak of card payments it has been registered Monday 23 December with nearly 21 million operations of which 18 million made in physical stores and about 3 million online.