Record Cyber Monday spending tops $3 billion, sets record

Who won the November 2015 holiday sales battle? Shoppers in Mexico are also buying jewelry and ornaments.

Smartphones were the preferred method of online purchases on Cyber Monday, according to IBM, driving 15 percent of Internet sales, up about 70 percent from past year.

Prior to Black Friday, separate surveys by UPS Canada and IPG Mediabrands found that Canadians said they would shop at Canadian retailers rather than shop at USA retailers both in-store and online. Black Friday saw even stronger ecommerce sales, $1.66 billion-up 10% compared to 2014. It will not be surprising if online sales dominate physical in-store sales in the next few years. “We’ll closely watch the growth of Thanksgiving sales next year to see if they can surpass Black Friday as the second-biggest online shopping day”. The company still maintains its forecast of a 2.4 percent increase in sales for in-store retailers this holiday season. Consumers saw an average discount of 20.3 percent. Mobile traffic accounted for 47.9 percent of all online traffic, an increase of 16.3% over 2014. The average shopper spent $135.25, up 4 percent from a year ago.

The residents of these cities contributed the most to mobile sales. According to Custora, more than 36 percent of Black Friday’s shoppers used mobile means to buy merchandise.

Analysts say today could be the biggest online shopping day ever, with estimates that sales could top $3 billion. There was a 10 percent increase in the spending through the five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, totaling $7.201 billion.

Americans averaged $101 in daily spending during the last full week of November, based on interviewing from Monday, Nov. 23, through Sunday, Nov. 29.

Cyber Monday shoppers mainly went after electronics, including TVs, tablets and the Apple Watch.

eBay and Amazon were the most mentioned retailers on social channels over the long holiday-shopping weekend, according to the Adobe Digital Index.

First Data compiled the year-over-year review using sales figures for more than 820,000 of its merchant locations across all USA states.

Online shopping is taking its toll on brick-and-mortar shopping.

The significance of each of these three shopping days is declining as merchants offer discounts earlier in the year and continue through December.

And, according to Watson, more people are shopping with their smartphones than with their tablets.

Advertisement

Certainly the shift to online shopping is a major shift in consumer behaviour, especially when it comes to mobile ecommerce, but bad economic conditions can definitely put a damper on overall spending.