Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring in £2 billion for retailers

Yet Target, which offered 15% discounts on nearly all online items, still reported its biggest online sales day ever.

That included a record $3.07 billion spent on Cyber Monday alone, making it the largest online sales day ever, Adobe said.

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.

To compete with each other and Amazon.com Inc, most US retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy began offering some of the season’s best online deals, which traditionally had been reserved for Cyber Monday, several weeks in advance.

Almost half of all online traffic was mobile and 27.6 percent of online sales were the result mobile traffic, according to IBM Watson Trend, and that represents a 25 percent increase from 2014. Adobe’s Online Shopping reports offer the most comprehensive compilation of data in the industry. “There are certain hot products, hoverboards seem to be a phenomenon, they’re selling out everywhere”, said Scot Wingo, chairman of ChannelAdvisor, which provides e-commerce services to retailers. There was a 78% increase in orders placed by online shoppers in China with USA retailers compared to this day previous year.

“Cyber Monday is becoming Cyber Week”, said Marlene Morris Towns, a Georgetown University marketing professor who studies online shopping. And observers have pointed out that this shows the true paradigm shift that Black Friday has created, since in the past, it was Cyber Monday that saw an annual peak in safe shopping online.

Cyber Monday’s haul was a little lower, with £934 million spent this year. O said in its report.

IBM has predicted Cyber Monday online sales will grow by more than 18 percent compared to 2014. Also, there was a 36% increase in orders placed online by United Kingdom consumers with USA retailers on the Sunday after Black Friday compared to this same day in 2014. Sales fell 10.4 per cent from a year earlier to US$20.43 billion, according to research firm ShopperTrak.