Cyber Monday transforms as shoppers are more connected

E-commerce sales rose 10.8 percent for the two-day period, while sales at physical stores grew 8.6 percent, according to First Data, which analyzed online and in-store payments across different forms of payment cards from almost one million merchants Thanksgiving and Friday.

As millions of people surf the web for deals, thousands of Amazon employees are working to keep up with the demand.

A reminder though, with so many shopping online you should be aware of scams. Yet a huge percentage of online shopping is generated from the sites and apps of traditional retailers. Thanksgiving only had 36 percent of those who shopped online and 35 percent in-store. Electronics and appliance stores saw a almost 28 percent sales growth, while for online, that growth was a little over 11 percent. According to data from RetailNext, net sales on Black Friday slid 10.4 percent for brick-and-mortar stores.

$1.93 billion: Sales on Thanksgiving, up 11.5 percent from a year earlier.

Cyber Monday is here, and shoppers are hopping online to take advantage of some hefty discounts. It is after all a tendency among online shoppers to browse a product and purchase later in the week. 25% shoppers use their lunch hour to buy items online, and 34% of them shop at night. That’s a 17.7% year-over-year increase, with Black Friday itself setting a new record by surpassing $3 billion for the first time at $3.34 billion, a 21.6% increase over 2015.

The social media buzz about Cyber Monday pointed to a surprising victor for the shopping holiday: eBay. Apparently, this move has been seen by Walmart, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s.

Mobile shopping was a clear victor.

Perhaps the one leading in e-commerce for quite some time is Amazon. Rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc WMT.N kept the number of online deals similar to the past four days.

It’s also been a record year for tech, according to the CTA, which says some 61.7 million US adults have bought or plan to buy technology products over the course of the big holiday shopping week. Meanwhile, the number of people who shopped in stores fell to 99.1 million from 101 million a year ago.

As expected, many shoppers were attracted by retailers’ sales. According to security firm Upguard, even just “ten minutes of downtime could translate to a loss of over $2 million in sales”. On the other hand, only 99.1 million bought in stores.