Cyber Monday shatters online record with 125 million Americans shopping online

IBD Leaderboard company Amazon.com ruled both Black Friday and Cyber Monday online, accounting for 36% of spending in a Slice Intelligence estimate Wednesday.

All this online activity doesn’t mean that consumers will stop shopping in stores on the holiday weekend – retail sales are still by far the biggest piece of the pie.

Cyber Monday-the Monday after Thanksgiving-set a record as the largest online sales day ever, with $3.07 billion spent by end of the day, or 16% more than the $2.64 billion spent in 2014, according to Adobe Inc.’s Adobe Digital Index.

“It’s not about at some point, but a season of digital offers”, stated Matthew Shay, president of retail commerce group The National Retail Federation.

Online sales were in stark contrast to the performance of brick-and-mortar retailers over the four-day weekend. Walmart’s average discount was 3.6% or less, while “Target showed the deepest discounts on average price across items, with 6.8% or less from the day before Thanksgiving through the day after Black Friday”.

The day has lost some of its luster as retailers push sales forward on the calendar to Thanksgiving and the Friday after the holiday.

Retailers with physical and online stores had the strongest growth, at 18 percent, making Cyber Monday more than an online-only retailer day, Adobe found.

Despite Black Friday marketing that many retailers started just after Halloween, shoppers weren’t much impressed with discounts, according to research from Boomerang Commerce. But whether Cyber Monday can hold on to its relevance will be a big question next year as deals continue to appear earlier.

Looking at time-of day trends holistically, ChannelAdvisor says the traffic surge on Cyber Monday started between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. ET and continued upward until peaking between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m. After leveling off throughout the afternoon, traffic began climbing again at 6:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m. ET.

On all five of the shopping days, Amazon outperformed the benchmark with a 21.1% increase on Cyber Monday, which was an acceleration from Black Friday.

“Retailers were trying to make their online business more attractive, but they got it at the expense of their in-store business”. Other chains – including grocery chain Asda – said their customers were so strongly opposed to Black Friday they abstained from the promotional bonanza altogether. Around 103 million people shopped online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

Shopping using mobile devices accounted for 26 percent of total online sales, up from 19 percent a year earlier, Adobe’s report said.

A decade ago, online shopping was in its beginning stage. That compares with fewer than 102 million who ventured into traditional stores, it said.