Cyber Monday shopping hits $10.8B
Online shoppers in the U.S. spent $10.8 billion on Monday, missing Adobe Inc.’s original projection by almost $2 billion, evidence that retailers pulled sales forward by offering deals earlier than usual.
Still, the gusher of online spending was a record, rising 15% from 2019.
“Cyber Monday continued to dominate the holiday shopping season, becoming the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history, despite early discounts from retailers,” Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement. “Throughout the remainder of the holiday season, we expect to see record sales continue and curbside pickup to gain even more momentum as shoppers avoid crowds and potential shipping delays.”
Hot sellers included toys such as Lego sets and scooters, video games like Super Mario 3-D All-Stars, and electronics including Apple AirPods, Hewlett-Packard & Dell Computers and Chromecast, Adobe said.
The pandemic-fueled stampede online was a valuable opportunity for retailers such as Amazon.com Inc., Walmart Inc., Target Corp., Best Buy Co., which had been preparing for the 2020 holiday deluge for months. There were occasional hiccups, but the industry’s investments in delivery capacity and parking lot pickup helped get it through the Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday.
Black Friday spending of $9 billion also missed Ado
be’s forecast of $10.3 billion, another sign of cautious consumer spending during the pandemic and shoppers reacting to deals earlier in the season. Amazon vacuumed up $1 in every $5 spent over the Black Friday weekend, the first time the Seattle-based giant accounted for the highest share of spending for the period, according to market research firm Numerator.
But Monday will likely still be the peak, because many shoppers are conditioned to hold off on big purchases in anticipation of price cuts.
Online deals Monday mostly weren’t much better than Black Friday deals, said Kristin McGrath, editor at BlackFriday.com, which monitors web deals. Harking back to traditional doorbuster Black Friday tactics, many digital shops are likely to offer eye-popping discounts on popular products that usually sell out quickly to attract people to their site, hoping they linger and load up shopping carts with other things.
The boom in overall spending is what retailers needed to bounce back after a challenging year that saw weeks of spring shutdowns, millions of worker furloughs and dozens of big-name bankruptcies, from J.C. Penney to J.Crew. Even with stores seeing half their normal foot traffic, the unprecedented surge in online orders is more than offsetting weakness in malls and shopping districts.
“We could be on track for the strongest holiday season in 20 years,” Matt Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, said in an interview on Black Friday.
Traffic at national chain stores was slow in the early mornings of Friday, and mall traffic also was down significantly from last year with Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., reporting foot traffic 60% less throughout the weekend than it was last year. However, malls still saw a noticeable uptick in foot traffic from earlier during the pandemic with customers lined up outside numerous stores that were limiting capacity.
Shoppers didn’t only turn to general retailers for their gifts. Smaller businesses saw success with online revenue growth of 294% on Saturday compared with an average day in October, according to Adobe. Consumers spent a record of $4.7 billion online on Small Business Saturday, representing more than a 30% increase compared with last year.
Overall, analytics company GlobalData reported Monday that holiday spending on Black Friday deals through the weekend showed Americans spent a total of $62.45 billion, an increase of 2.1% over the same period last year. Spending on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday collapsed as many consumers had already took advantage of early deals and many shoppers didn’t travel to stores.
“Retailers will be pleased with overall Black Friday trading,” Neil Saunders, GlobalData managing director, said in a statement. “However, the new pattern of business will produce some winners and losers. Those, like department stores, that rely on strong foot traffic to malls will have suffered more than those with a strong multichannel offer. There will also be increased costs from having to fulfill a higher volume of online orders.”