‘Cyber Monday’ sets a new record for online purchases

ComScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni, said: “Cyber Monday maintained its reputation as the most important online spending day of year, exceeding $3bn in total digital spending and once again becoming the heaviest online spending day of all-time”. This ties you in to that destination to start your shopping and if you find what you’re looking for you’re unlikely then to do any price comparison… especially if you inevitably find a lot of the time that the marketplace is competitive. Physical stores that closed on Thanksgiving saw robust online sales. Overall, there was a 38% increase in orders placed online by Chinese consumers with US retailers on Black Friday compared to a year ago.

The biggest in-store shopping day of the U.S. calendar was so-called Black Friday – the Friday after the annual last Thursday in November Thanksgiving holiday – when retailers often tip into the black for the year in revenue. Yet “Cyber Monday” has become engrained in the minds of enough shoppers and it endures as the top online spending day of the year.

America’s biggest online sales day still doesn’t come close to topping China’s bigget cyber sales day, Single’s Day, which is the largest shopping day in the world.

Adobe predicts that shoppers will spend nearly $1 billion per day online until Christmas. Mobile accounted for 37 percent of online revenue – 22 percent smartphones, 15 percent tablets – and drove a record-breaking $639 million in sales.

However, Adobe principal analyst Tamara Gaffney noted that the great boost in online sales will not continue for long as retailers have already begun to sell discounted products earlier than Black Friday and even before Thanksgiving, according to CNET.

President/CEO of Walmart.com, Fernando Madeira said: “Mobile firmly established itself as the dominant shopping trend for both traffic and sales”.

The Black Friday that isn’t really Black Friday anymore has come and gone. This number indicates that consumers are increasingly using their smartphones and tablets to do their holiday shopping.

Online shopping “stole the show”, said Springboard, a firm that tracks digital shoppers on Black Friday.

Some retailers have picked up on these shifting dynamics better than others.

Despite Black Friday marketing that many retailers started just after Halloween, shoppers weren’t much impressed with discounts, according to research from Boomerang Commerce. Smartphones also edged out tablets in purchases, driving 15.2% of online sales, which is up almost 70% over 2014.

Discounts on Amazon averaged 40 percent, e-commerce analytics company Clavis Insight said.

But 13 out of 100 product views returned an out-of-stock message Monday morning, more than twice the rate on an average day, according to Adobe.