USA TODAY International Edition
Cyber Monday heading into record territory
Adobe Analytics says holiday shoppers spent $840 million online by 10 a.m.
SAN FRANCISCO – Safely back in their office cubicles, Americans let their fingers do the shopping Monday, racking up $3.38 billion in online sales by the time the work day ended on the East Coast.
Cyber Monday was easily on track to be the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history, with Adobe Insights predicting sales of $6.6 billion.
The strongest surge in purchases was forecast to come between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. in every time zone, when everyone finally buys what they’ve been loading into their online shopping cards all day and over the “Turkey 5” — the five shopping days starting on Thanksgiving and continuing through Cyber Monday. That surge rolls across the country as each region hits the witching hour for buying.
Shoppers “know the deals end at midnight, so it’s the final rush,” said Tamara Gaffney, Adobe’s strategic insights engagement director.
Amazon likely took the biggest chunk of those sales. It is estimated to have a 42% share of all online sales, according to Slice Intelligence, a market
research firm.
“The problem for everybody else is that Amazon has basically become a verb. The reflex reaction is to start on Amazon and then you go other places only if you can’t find what you want there,” said Bob Goodwin, consumer electronics practice lead at InfoScout, a consumer behavior research company.
Walmart, though, is making serious inroads. Its prices on average are now just 0.3% more expensive than Amazon, according to Market Track, a data analytics company. Last year its prices were 3% higher.
“With investments in buying online and pickup in-store, as well as the acquisitions of Jet, ModCloth, Moosejaw, and Bonobos, the most interesting story will be how much ground” Walmart has made up, said Ken Cassar, principal analyst with Slice.
Cyber Monday started from the days when few people had a fast Internet connection outside of an office. Monday was the first work day after the Thanksgiving holiday and the first time they could painlessly shop online. Retailers responded with special “cyber shopping” deals.
That’s no longer the case on several levels — fast connections are the norm, and people shop online at home. What’s more, they’re increasingly ditching computers as their primary shopping devices.
Mobile users now make up 53.3% of all visits to shopping websites, Adobe found. A full 44.6% of those were on a smartphone and another 8.7% on tablets.
One feature that has really driven this trend has been the ever-more-sophisticated ability of our phones to autofill information.
Instead of having to type in name, address, credit-card info and more with big fingers on a small screen, more and more retailers are leveraging autofill to make the process easier and smoother.