Cyber Monday outshines Black Friday

Don’t count out the brick and mortar businesses quite yet however, Rohrer says in the past few years they’ve started accepting Cyber Monday shipments into store for pick up, making shopping even more convenient.

Walmart started its sales on Sunday night, while Target, Kohl’s and Amazon offered a week of online discounts leading up to the big shopping weekend. But enough shoppers have been trained to look for “Cyber Monday” specific sales to ensure the holiday will still mean big bucks for retailers.

Cyber Monday sales hit $2.98 billion which is an increase of 12% over last year’s sales on the same occasion, reports Adobe Digital Index.

Online sales account for about 3 percent of Target’s $73 billion in annual sales. Adobe reports online shoppers received the dreaded “this item is no longer in stock” message for 13 out of every 100 items.

The Cyber Monday is one of the biggest online sales event of the holiday shopping season and giant retailers are gearing up and doing everything they possibly can to ensure that their plans will run smooth so that their 2015’s Cyber Monday break the revenue they earned up in the most recent year. Over the same weekend in 2014, online sales grew 17 percent and were up 8.5 percent on Monday that year.

Counting the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online sales are expected to reach $11 billion, a 15 percent increase from past year, according to Adobe. Usually, such deals were kept for Cyber Monday, Reuters reported. This year, Cyber Monday eclipsed its Black Friday counterpart.

Amazon said this morning that its top-selling times were all Amazon-made products, like the Fire TV consoles and tablets.

Amazon, in particular had a strong Cyber Monday, with third-party sales up 25.6% over previous year, according to ChannelAdvisor. eBay, for comparison was up 3.2% over 2014.

“I personally skip Black Friday just to shop Cyber Monday”, said Mark Flores, a parks and recreation director from Lynwood, California.

“We are having specials from Black Friday, Thanksgiving Day, and the entire week to the end of this week”, said Monze Garcia, customer service for Best Buy. “With debit cards, we’ve all seen what happened before and that’s affected a lot of people”, said Gaines.

Target managed to score high on that list despite having some site issues during the day, causing some shoppers to have to wait to access the website.