Cyber Monday sales slow as Web shopping spans holiday season

Target Corp’s website, one of the shopping hotspots, faced a glitch as it was unavailable intermittently on Cyber Monday which is considered one of the traditionally busiest days for online shopping through the year.

IBM has also predicted that online sales on the day will increase by 18% compared to 2014, due to growing consumer preferences to shop through mobile devices. But enough shoppers have been trained to look for “Cyber Monday” specific sales to ensure the holiday will still mean big bucks for retailers. The average shopper spent $135.25, up 4 percent from a year ago.

Sales this Thanksgiving and Black Friday both fell in store, with more shoppers finding it easier to beat the surplus of savages searching for a deal at dawn by taking advantage of discounts online.

“Despite some talk of Cyber Monday declining in importance, the day’s historical highs and continued strong growth rates confirm it is still a hugely important shopping event”, said comScore chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni. This year we saw Amazon start offering its Black Friday deals on November 20, a week ahead of time. “There are certain hot products, hoverboards seem to be a phenomenon, they’re selling out everywhere”, said Scot Wingo, chairman of ChannelAdvisor, which provides e-commerce services to retailers.

In the weeks before the shopping extravaganza began, REI and Best Buy dominated the conversation on Twitter, but as of Black Friday retailer Kohl’s had taken over the top spot with 112K mentions.

The current record for one-day online sales was set last week on Black Friday, when $2.74 billion worth of merchandise was sold. Around 103 million people shopped online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. The result is that consumers can find cheap prices before, during, and after Black Friday, in sharp contrast from years past, when numerous best Black Friday sales were limited to shoppers who waited in line for hours early in the morning after Thanksgiving.

Customers spent about $124 on average. It appears that shoppers made more expensive purchases on Cyber Monday, as cart values match Black Friday levels but contained fewer items. Additionally, retailers grew their sales by 24.1 percent year over year on Amazon, 24.3 percent year over year on Google Shopping and 2.6 percent year over year on eBay.

The spending spree comes even as several retailers had problems during Cyber Monday.

“We worked closely with our brand advertisers and retail partners for what we knew would be the highest grossing online shopping season to date”, said HookLogic CEO Jonathan Opdyke. Mobile spending, or sales via smartphones and tablets, jumped 53 percent to $838 million, making up 27 percent of total online spending. This could indicate that more consumers are shopping online instead.