Record $12.7B online sales seen for Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday

The holiday shopping experience continues with online deals as retailers roll out Cyber Monday, expecting record results.

Adobe has released its 2016 online shopping data for Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day.

“For the last few years, there’s been an extension of the Black Friday online shopping behavior”, Tony Zito, chief executive officer of Rakuten Marketing, told Bloomberg.

Shopping from mobile devices seems to be in the in-thing, as 28 million or roughly 23 percent of Cyber Monday shoppers plan to shop from their mobile devices, compared to 29.6 million a year ago. Forty percent plan to do the vast majority of their holiday shopping online, according to market researcher CivicScience, and another 35 percent plan to split spending between online and off. Cyber Monday “is actually taking place”, said Tom Burke, vice president of Barnesandnoble.com, which, along with Staples, said sales on Monday were the biggest this holiday season. The survey represents a demographically representative US sample of 1,022 adults 18 years of age and older. Most will be on the computer: 98.6 million people will shop from their home desktops, while 11.2 million will shop from computers at work.

About 122 million Americans are expected to shop online today as retailers roll out a new batch of deals projected to generate $3.36 billion in sales.

“The first couple of weeks with the election were a complete distracter from the normal course of business and…a warmer climate in November may have made the sales more stubborn”, she said, adding that she saw sales picking up in December.

This year, IBM’s Holiday Readiness team is supporting 41% more clients – keeping online shopping up and running for some of the world’s largest brands through its highly scalable and secure platform.

Not surprisingly, online sales by all projections grew sharply over Black Friday weekend while in-store purchases declined vs. the year-ago period.

While online sales are morphing Black Friday into more of a cyber-themed event, it’s the promotions and deals that will have consumers paying attention on Cyber Monday, according to Prosper’s principal analyst Pam Goodfellow.

This Black Friday has brought some good news for Apple Inc. “Finally, Walmart is also offering up a great deal on a Surface Pro 4 12.3” model for $1,099.99.

“I’m shopping soon rather than later, to get it over with and not having to worry about things being sold out”, Agnello said.

Black Friday also became the first day in retail history to generate over one billion dollars in mobile revenue at $1.2 billion, a 33 percent growth YoY.

– Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.