Yesterday’s Cyber Monday drew in record sales, with numbers jumping 17.8 percent over the same day previous year, according to IBM Watson analytics.
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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.
The biggest in-store shopping day of the United States calendar was so-called Black Friday – the Friday after the annual last Thursday in November Thanksgiving holiday – when retailers often tip into the black for the year in revenue.
It’s too early for sales figures, but Monday is still expected to be the biggest online shopping day ever, likely racking up more than $3 billion in sales, according to research firm comScore.
Sales this Thanksgiving and Black Friday both fell in store, with more shoppers finding it easier to beat the surplus of savages searching for a deal at dawn by taking advantage of discounts online.
By the end of the day the Centre for Retail Research predicts spending online and in-stores across the entire Black Friday four-day period will hit £3.49 billion, with Mastercard going further and predicting United Kingdom consumers will end up spending £5.9bn on all retail sectors (excluding fuel).
During the Cyber Five, other third-party marketplaces (a grouping of online marketplaces excluding Amazon and eBay) had the highest growth rate of all channels measured by the e-commerce software company, growing 82.8 percent year over year.
Cyber Monday has come and gone, and the lesson for retailers is a familiar one: invest in online. She said she hoped to get most of her Christmas shopping done on Cyber Monday.
“Cyber Monday is becoming Cyber Week”, said Marlene Morris Towns, a Georgetown University marketing professor who studies online shopping.
Like Time Warner Cable, Target also had a problem as the company’s website crashed due to the inability to handle the Cyber Monday traffic.
It wasn’t enough that Target set new records with in-store sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. For most of the past decade, the Monday following Thanksgiving was the busiest day for Web shopping as USA consumers returned to work and used their offices’ fast Internet connections to buy holiday gifts. It will not be surprising if online sales dominate physical in-store sales in the next few years. About 72% of sales came from computers.
Consumers also turned to their mobile devices for Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping.
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Over $514 million in sales were attributed to mobile, including $313 million from smartphones ($205 million iPhones, $107 million Android) and $201 million from tablets ($170 million iPad, $28 million Android).
