Cyber Monday sales ring up $3B, beat forecast
In this Monday, Nov. 30, 2015, photo, Mark Oldenburg processes outgoing orders at Amazon.com’s fulfillment center in DuPont, Wash. Some Black Friday deals were available online hours before retailers made them available in stores last week.
According to data pulled from Adobe’s ADBE Digital Index data tool, total online sales for Cyber Monday increased 16% from past year, a number that beat the software company’s initial prediction of an increase of 12%.
Cyber Monday is the online retailer’s answer to Black Friday deals and while it’s been popular for several years, it continues to grow as people look for deals at home. Even on Cyber Monday, where most sales throughout the day aren’t done in store, but rather online.
“The big story is that consumers are getting increasingly comfortable purchasing online on Cyber Monday or any other day”, said Ken Cassar, Principal Analyst at Slice Intelligence. According to Catchpoint Systems, which monitors the retail website, Target put its online shoppers in a virtual line to provide gradual access in order to reduce traffic congestion.
More than a quarter of those sales (26 percent) came from mobile devices, generating $799 million in sales. It is possible that Cyber Monday is simply morphing more and more into regular online buying habits of increasingly Internet-savvy consumers.
Among the biggest retailer headlines yesterday was that Target’s website crashed due to high demand. Slice spokeswoman Jaimee Minney told IBD that Amazon’s Cyber Monday market share fell 2.7 percentage points from past year while Wal-Mart Stores gained share.
“Secondly, it is hamstrung by its own name – primarily making it an online only shopping day”. The company calculates $11 billion in total was spent between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday.
The NRF estimates overall sales for November and December will rise 3.7 percent to $630.5 billion compared with previous year.
Separately, IBM Commerce found that Cyber Monday sales rose 17.8 percent over the same day in 2014. Despite the looming specter of ad-blockers, display ads saw the largest growth of 50 percent over a year ago in pointing people to sales. MasterCard Advisors tracks spending across all payments including credit and debit cards and cash. That’s about twice the normal rate, with Star Wars figures and video game bundles (PS4 Disney Infinity and Battlefront Bundles), Xbox One Fallout 4 and Halo Bundles, and Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar among the hardest to find. Both reports showed an increase in spending from past year and highlighted the continuing trend of consumers shopping more frequently through their phones and tablets.