Cyber Monday spending tops $3 billion

Still, Monday is expected to be the biggest online shopping day ever, with estimates that it will rack up over $3 billion in sales.

The £1.1 billion in sales made on Black Friday alone represent a 36 per cent year on year increase, with Experian confirming that this was the first time that the billion pound mark had been breached in a single day of shopping.

First off, Cyber Monday has always been a kick-off day for online sales rather than the day of greatest sales (even though many stories each year dutifully report, wrongly, that it is the biggest day for online sales in the US).

The tech titan Amazon commanded online networking on Cyber Monday. Mobile commerce is estimated to have accounted for 27 percent of total digital commerce on Cyber Monday 2015, with $838 million spent via smartphones and tablets. Top online shopping destinations included Amazon, Wal-Mart, eBay, Target and Best Buy. Amazon said some orders in the USA and Canada had incorrectly applied shipping charges, but it discovered the error and refunded the charges. Target’s Web site was briefly offline due to high traffic. Online sales make up 10 percent of overall retail sales, but that increases to 15 percent during the holidays as online shoppers snap up Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, according to research firm Forrester. A year ago, the nation’s largest retailer only offered a sneak peak of about 20 deals on the evening before Cyber Monday.

“It certainly is becoming more like Cyber November because people are getting a jump on their holiday shopping much earlier year over year”, Joanna Lambert, vice president of global consumer product and engineering at PayPal, said. Interestingly, Amazon’s dominance actually slipped slightly from a 38.8 percent marketshare on Cyber Monday 2014.

More than 103 million people shopped online over the four- day weekend, which started last Thursday on Thanksgiving, according to an annual survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation.

A trend had already emerged for online sales to spike the Monday after Thanksgiving, attributed to employees returning to work and faster internet connections. Now, even with broadband access, Cyber Monday continues to be a day when retailers pull out big promotions. Its data found that Cyber Monday still tops Black Friday for e-commerce, counting 74.6 million shoppers who spent an average of $47.90.