Cyber Monday racks up a record $3B in sales

Although Black Friday has been a fixture of Thanksgiving weekend much longer than Cyber Monday has been, more consumers shopped online over the weekend than in stores, according to USA Today. The first 18 days in December are expected to generate $1 billion in sales a day.

Overall, online sales yesterday totaled $2.98 billion, a 12 percent gain from Cyber Monday 2014, according to the ADI.

While online revenue is still a fraction of traditional retailers’ overall sales – between 10 and 15 percent – it is an increasingly important component, especially as millions of consumers adapt to using their mobile devices as their go-to shopping tool.

Fortune was able to calculate that figure based on projections from Adobe, which tracks around 80 percent of the online transactions that take place each day at the nation’s top 100 retailers.

The largest metropolitan areas with the highest online sales growth between Thanksgiving and Sunday were Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago and Los Angeles. Adobe said that mobile sales reached a volume record and $799 million of total online spending came from a smartphone or tablet. What Cyber Monday does offer is often great deals on electronic items.

Social media’s share of sales increased 33% year over year with a major spike at 6 p.m. ET when consumers got home from work and spent time on their favorite social networking sites.

They said they’re still cashing in at the Outlets of MS, despite national trends favoring Cyber Monday.

Adobe, IBM, RetailNext, MasterCard have all tracked data of online retail sales.

Amazon.com, meanwhile, started its blitz of more than 30,000 “lightning deals” way back on November 20, likely a nod to the fact that shoppers are looking for deals long before Cyber Monday – or even Black Friday – arrives.

Electronics made up the bulk of the Cyber Monday purchases, with Sony’s 4k television, Apple iPads, and gaming console PlayStation 4 outpacing competitors in their respective product classes.

Like Time Warner Cable, Target also had a problem as the company’s website crashed due to the inability to handle the Cyber Monday traffic. Earlier this year, the company increased its mobile app’s capacity sevenfold to handle growing demand.

Cyber Monday marks the end of a four-day pre-Christmas shopping splurge over the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. but it has become a busy online shopping day in the United Kingdom thanks to discounting by retailers.