Reports now coming in indicate that this was a whopper of a holiday shopping season — especially for ecommerce brands. 

Total retail sales grew by 3.4% YoY, and online sales leaped by 18.8%, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse.

Granted,e-commerce sales made up only 14.6% of the total retail grab bag. But that jumped to 24.5% on Cyber Monday. And ecommerce pulled in 15.4% of all purchases on Black Friday.

Email’s contribution to this haul was not clear at deadline. But ecommerce firms better have their transactional email systems in place to deal with the follow-up to this wave. That includes the ability to send instant confirmations and updates, and to upsell and cross-sell and keep the wave going.

All this is happening as Amazon claims its holiday sales have set records. Amazon’s best sellers were the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick and Echo Show 5.

Meanwhile, according MasterCard, apparel sales grew by 1% overall — and 17% via commerce. 

Similarly, jewelry sales rose by 1.8% in total, and 8.8% online.

The difference was even more pronounced in the department store sector. Total sales declined by 1.8%, while online buying grew by 6.9%.

“E-commerce sales hit a record high this year with more people doing their holiday shopping online,” states Steve Sadove, senior advisor for Mastercard and former CEO of Saks Incorporated.

Sadove adds that “due to a later than usual Thanksgiving holiday, we saw retailers offering omnichannel sales earlier in the season, meeting consumers’ demand for the best deals across all channels and devices.”

The report is based on aggregate sales activity in the Mastercard payments network.