This provided a large potential strategic advantage to shipping club provider such as Amazon, as 77% of shipping club members reported heavier shopping at the retailer for which they are a member compared to 60% the previous year.
Advertisement
Smartphones and tablets accounted for 49 percent of shopping visits (38 percent smartphones, 11 percent tablets), resulting in 28 percent of online sales (17 percent smartphones, 11 percent tablets).
This year’s Cyber Monday is expected to increase by 12 percent over 2014, to bring in a total of $2.98 billion, according to projections from Adobe.
Last year’s Black Friday was marred by long queues and brawls in stores.
Kathye Gaines of Consumer Credit Counseling says all shoppers need to keep track of their purchases, but also use credit rather than debit cards for their security benefits.
Not surprisingly, a lot of the Cyber Monday action happened on mobile devices, although the majority of actual sales still took place on desktop.
In a sign of changing consumer spending, Thanksgiving saw a spike in online sales this year, reaching $1.7 billion, up a whopping 25 percent, Adobe said.
“Cyber Monday has pushed online spending to a new high”, Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Index, said in a statement Monday night.
The email also said the company’s systems would be placing shoppers in a queue, and would prompt them to try later to access the site.
Meanwhile, BizRate Insights, a division of Connexity, notes that more than half of mobile purchases on Cyber Monday were made via smartphone.
This year’s Black Friday bonanza was the first time in the United Kingdom that online retail sales surpassed £1 billion in one day. “While Cyber Monday was still the biggest shopping day of the holiday period, consumers continued 2014’s trend of shopping more aggressively on Thanksgiving, which became the third-biggest shopping day of the Cyber Five weekend”.
Thanksgiving weekend sales at brick-and-mortar stores dropped 10.4% year over year, according to retail research firm ShopperTrak.
Target’s website flashed a message saying there was a site error due to unusually high traffic.
Advertisement
More than 103 million people shopped online over the four- day weekend, which started Thursday on Thanksgiving, according to an annual survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation. Mobile is taking over online shopping.
