Cyber Monday sales start strong

Walmart too noted that over 70 percent of visits to Walmart.com came from mobile devices.

The tenth anniversary of Cyber Monday looks like it will be a record breaker, according to early indicators from experts. But now that shoppers are online all the time anyway, the 10-year-old shopping holiday is losing some of its luster.

Target managed to score high on that list despite having some site issues during the day, causing some shoppers to have to wait to access the website.

A survey by the National Retail Foundation says over one hundred and twenty million individual shoppers plan to shop online today. Social media results are based on over 35 million social mentions from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday captured and analyzed from blogs, Google+, Reddit, Twitter, Dailymotion, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Foursquare, YouTube, WordPress and others.

Did you take advantage of Cyber Monday? While Black Friday is nowhere close to being dislodged as the gold-standard day of consumption in the USA – reaching $10 billion in sales this year – the participation rate in Cyber Monday, especially among millennials, is driving the steady growth for the online shopping spree. Forty-six percent of Cyber Monday shoppers said they expect it to be their heaviest online shopping day of the year, up from 39% in 2014.

And some retailer’s websites couldn’t keep up with the web traffic.

According to MasterCard, the four-day period saw specialty apparel retailers sales grow as colder weather hiked up the demand for winter apparels. Both reports showed an increase in spending from a year ago and highlighted the continuing trend of consumers shopping more frequently through their phones and tablets. People are still most likely to buy using Apple devices, such as iPhones and iPads, which accounted for 75.6 percent of all sales. However, the revenue for department store chains and electronics retailers remained tepid, Reuters reported. In addition, Black Friday deals have expanded into Thanksgiving Day.

Amazon itself said sales of its electronic gadgets more than tripled over the entire Thanksgiving weekend, with the Fire tablet its top-selling product.

Shares in the major retailers failed to get much of a pop from the strong long-weekend sales.

“Out of stock is at an all time high this Cyber Monday – 15 out of 100 product views are returning out of stock messages”, Adobe said.