The demise of Black Friday and Cyber Monday

The “biggest online shopping day” is now behind us. Yet “Cyber Monday” has become ingrained in the minds of enough shoppers and it endures as the top online spending day of the year.

It’s the sixth year in a row that Cyber Monday has been top online sales day on record.

Adobe says Cyber Monday sales topped $3 billion, up 16 percent from a year ago. “Cyber Monday” has lost some of its luster, however, with retailers offering online deals since the beginning of November.

The report was based on data from 200 million visits to 4,500 retail websites on what is traditionally the busiest day of the year for Internet shopping.

From Adobe’s data and press release: it has shown that out-of-stock rates on Cyber Monday were at an all-time high, with 13 out of 100 product views showing an out-of-stock message, over two times the normal rate.

“Cyber Monday is becoming Cyber Week”, said Marlene Morris Towns, a Georgetown University marketing professor who studies online shopping.

Between Thanksgiving Day and Sunday, $8.03 billion was spent online, a 17 percent increase from 2014, Adobe said. Some of the most popular items on weekend shopping lists included televisions from Samsung, Sony and LG Electronics, as well as the Apple Watch and Beats by Dre headphones, according to IBM’s Watson Trend app. Other popular choices are hoverboards, Nike running shoes, Activision Blizzard‘s Skylanders video-game series and Star Wars R2-D2 droids. The name was also a nod to online shopping being done at work where faster connections made it easier to browse. Overall, there was a 38% increase in orders placed online by Chinese consumers with USA retailers on Black Friday compared to a year ago. Also, there was a 32% increase in orders placed by online shoppers in the United Kingdom with USA retailers on the Saturday after Black Friday this year compared to the same day in 2014.

Among many strong performers, Amazon.com Inc stood out, clocking a 21.1 per cent rise in Cyber Monday sales, according to e-commerce software provider ChannelAdvisor.

More than 103 million people shopped online over the four- day weekend, which started last Thursday on Thanksgiving, according to an annual survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation. That compares with 12.4pc of buys made on tablets. Desktop purchases averaged $138 while smartphone purchase averaged $102.