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Yelp’s Top 20 Cities for Local Holiday Shopping in 2016



The holiday season is officially upon us! A recent Yelp-commissioned survey conducted online by Harris Poll among over 2,000 U.S. adults found that 64% of Americans are likely to shop at local independent businesses this holiday season, and those local shoppers plan to spend an average of $324 each, up from the $258 average in 2015. What’s more, our survey found that 37% of American adults have already started or plan to start holiday shopping before Thanksgiving, and over half of Americans (53%) will have already started or plan to start holiday shopping by Small Business Saturday (November 26th).

According to Yelp data, Yelpers are up late searching for the best places to shop. We see that Yelp searches in the shopping category tend to spike around 11:00pm. We also found that Yelpers tend to be last-minute shoppers, with searches for businesses in the shopping category spiking less than a week before Christmas. But where are these Yelpers shopping? Or, where should they be shopping?

We sifted through millions of Yelp reviews to find out which cities in the U.S. are the best for finding gifts at local businesses. To determine this list, we created a gifting score for each city by looking at positive reviews mentioning the word “gift” written by locals for non-chain businesses in specific shopping categories that are popular for the holidays. We then ranked the resulting cities based on the gifting score.

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Click on each of our top 20 cities below to unveil our Yelp Community Managers’ top picks for local shopping in each city.

Yelp’s Top 20 Cities for Local Holiday Shopping in 2016

  1. San Diego, CA
  2. Austin, TX
  3. Denver, CO
  4. Reno, NV
  5. Seattle, WA
  6. Tampa, FL
  7. Indianapolis, IN
  8. Louisville, KY
  9. Las Vegas, NV
  10. Portland, OR
  11. Huntington Beach, CA
  12. Houston, TX
  13. Miami, FL
  14. Chicago, IL
  15. Phoenix, AZ
  16. Baton Rouge, LA
  17. Albuquerque, NM
  18. Cincinnati, OH
  19. Rochester, NY
  20. Pittsburgh, PA

 

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