Big retail mostly was downIn the end the success or failure of any chain during the holiday shopping season will no longer be judged just based upon Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales numbers.
Advertisement
Cyber Monday itself is expected to be the biggest online sales day of the season and ever, surpassing $3 billion in sales.
“Despite some talk of Cyber Monday declining in importance, the day’s historical highs and continued strong growth rates confirm it is still a hugely important shopping event”, said comScore Chairman Emeritus Gian Fulgoni. In Dallas-Fort Worth, almost 44% of the total online sales transactions were made through smart phones and tablets.
The spending spree comes even as several retailers had technical problems on Monday. Shoppers in Canada were second for placing orders with USA retailers on Black Friday in 2015.
Target also witnessed huge traffic on its website on Cyber Monday, due to which customers experienced delays.
Adobe Digital Index calculated that shoppers spent $2.74 billion online on Black Friday, an increase of 14.3 percent over 2014. In addition, Amazon had “app-only” deals, as well as deals that were offered earlier to Prime members, which may have helped.
Around 103 million people shopped online between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.
Target competed most closely with Amazon on toy prices, especially after Black Friday, when it undercut Amazon throughout Cyber Monday.
Vogel and his team report that 151 million people shopped over the holiday weekend, citing data from the National Retail Federation. 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. Now, even with broadband access, Cyber Monday continues to be a day when retailers pull out big promotions. Overall, there was a 3% increase in Canadians placing orders online this year with USA retailers compared to Black Friday 2014.
Anne Marie Stephen, founder of Smart Women In Retail Leadership and CEO and founder of KWOLIA, a strategic advisory firm for retail and emerging retail technologies, says she agrees with a forecast in a recent CNBC series on the future of retail that 30% of the 1,000 shopping malls in the United States may shutter in the next 25 years “Online commerce will be a strong influence on this decreasing retail footprint”, she says.
Advertisement
Some of the most popular items on weekend shopping lists included televisions from Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Corp. and LG Electronics Inc., as well as the Apple Watch and Beats by Dre headphones, according to IBM’s Watson Trend app. Other popular choices are hoverboards, Nike Inc. running shoes, Activision Blizzard Inc.’s Skylanders video-game series and Star Wars R2-D2 droids. Before becoming Editor of MobilePaymentsToday.com, he spent two years as the content manager for PaymentsJournal.com, a leading payments industry news aggregator and information hub published by Mercator Advisory Group.
