Deep discounts and flash sales lured shoppers online making it the “largest online sales day in history”, Adobe says, which anonymously tracks data from 80 percent of the nation’s top 100 retailers across 4,500 websites.
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Yesterday’s Cyber Monday drew in record sales, with numbers jumping 17.8 percent over the same day past year, according to IBM Watson analytics. Cyber Monday sales growth far outstripped that of traditional high street shopping on Black Friday, which saw sales fall by more than a billion to $10.4 billion.
Cyber Monday has turned into Cyber Week, and big retailers like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy have started their offerings several weeks in advance.
A spike in online sales on the first Monday after the U.S. Thanksgiving weekend was originally attributed to fast Internet connections in the office, which persuaded shoppers to wait out Black Friday and make purchases online from their workplace.
This Black Friday, in-store sales fell more than $1 billion, but we spent $2.5 billion online.
But a recent study by Kenshoo, an online marketing company, points to Thanksgiving Day, itself, as possibly the next big online shopping day. The average order was $133, according to the data Adobe collected, and over a quarter of those sales were done on phones or tablets. The company claims there is a 64 percent increase for mobile search spend over previous year. That’s 14 percent higher than a year ago.
National sales show more people are shifting from shopping in stores to online. Cyber Monday came on the heels of a big shopping weekend that was consumed with Black Friday deals.
ComScore expects online sales to rise 14 percent to $70.06 billion during the Christmas shopping period, slowing slightly from last year’s 15 percent rise.
The two reports stressed the foothold that mobile platforms, such as smartphones and tablets, have had in recent years during the online shopping day. Black Friday has become a staple of the Thanksgiving holiday season, serving as the day where the overwhelming majority of gifts to be unwrapped on Christmas day are purchased.
The run-up to the festive season is always a key time for retailers, although by focusing sales into this small window at the end of November, it may be that December’s figures are less promising.
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Shopper Diane Boral, from Oxnard, Calif., found toys, games and clothing at Kohls.com for 20 percent off.
