Cyber Monday sales expected to reach $3 billion

MTN News- Cyber Monday is in full swing.

Cyber Monday itself is expected to be the biggest online sales day of the season and ever, surpassing $3 billion in sales. High traffic even caused Target’s website to briefly crash on Monday.

“We recognize the experience is much different than it used to be as just as many people want that unique, exclusive online deal as they do that in-store promotion”, said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay.

This hurt spending and customer traffic at stores during Thanksgiving evening and Black Friday. And lots of that online shopping is now happening on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, which accounted for 28% of online sales this year.

Cyber Monday shoppers are expected to spend 3 billion dollars or more which is up 12% from 2014 and that does not include those who logged in early.

As retailers seamlessly transitioned from Black Friday deals to Cyber Monday deals as early as Saturday, they were riding the tailwind of a shopping weekend that found more than 103 million people say they had or planned to shop online Thursday through Sunday, according to the National Retail Federation’s consumer sentiment survey of 4,281 people out Sunday. About $4.47 billion were spent online on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday combined, 18 percent more than past year, according to Adobe.

036-c-19-(Chris Rugaber (ROO’-gay-bur), AP economics writer)-“to repeat that”-AP correspondent Chris Rugaber reports numerous big online retailers are taking steps to make sure that orders are filled and shipped on time this year, after late gifts last year infuriated customers”.

Looking at the retail sales figures from this year’s Black Friday, you might conclude the annual shopping tradition is dying out. It also is offering more than 150 app-only lightning deals to encourage mobile shopping.

Wal-Mart started offering all of its 2,000 Cyber Monday deals – quadruple the 500 online deals it offered a year ago – starting 8 p.m. on Sunday the evening before.

“I have more time to browse for items”, online, she said.

But the best deals might not be in video games or electronics.