Cyber Monday sales on set to break records

ChannelAdvisor, which tracks third-party sales on online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, estimated that Cyber Monday sales were up 16.8% from a year ago, as of 3 p.m. ET on Monday.

More than 103 million people shopped online over the four-day weekend, which started on Thanksgiving, according to a survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation. The best deals in the extended holiday shopping season usually being offered on Cyber Monday, not on Black Friday, for the retailers to sell out their inventories. Frenzied crowds seemed to be a thing of the past on Black Friday – the busy shopping day after Thanksgiving – and sales fell to $10.4 billion this year, down from $11.6 billion in 2014, according to preliminary figures from research firm ShopperTrak.

Market researchers from the Adobe Digital Index reported sales of over $3 billion (2.83 billion euros) on Cyber Monday, or a 12 percent increase year-on-year.

The data analysis arm of Adobe Systems Inc. called Cyber Monday 2015 the “largest online sales day in history”.

“Many brands and retailers had their “mobile moment” in 2015, when more than 50 percent of their total web traffic came from mobile devices”, said Wingo.

While Cyber Monday broke records, in-store retail sales declined on Black Friday weekend. The top retailers for Cyber Monday were Amazon, Target, CostCo and BestBuy. The first 18 days in December are expected to generate $1 billion in sales a day.

Shopper Diane Boral, from Oxnard, Calif., found toys, games and clothing at Kohls.com for 20 percent off. “Cyber Monday really lives on as a way to perpetuate the sales that now actually are starting to happen a long time before the start of Black Friday and even before Thanksgiving itself”. Nomura analyst Robert Drbul and his team said total same store sales on Amazon over those days increased by more than the 15% estimate for e-commerce growth previously given by comScore.

Arkansas Business’ Lance Turner explained to us how online shopping is now taking a toll on shopping at brick-and-mortar stores.

Specifically, consumers who were living in Ohio, Wisconsin and Kentucky had to wait for Time Warner Cable to fix the issue before the users were able to shop on Cyber Monday.