CYBER MONDAY SALES CRUSH LAST YEAR’S HAUL
Shopping on pace to beat 2015’s figures by almost 10%
Cyber Monday, the final lap in the Thanksgiving holiday shopping relay, is on pace to top last year’s sales figures by almost double digits.
Adobe Digital Insights expected shoppers would spend $3.36 billion on Cyber Monday, the traditional day when retailers roll out a raft of digital deals.
That’s a 9.4% leap over last year.
In the hours between midnight and 10 a.m., consumers had already spent $540 million, scooping up Sony PlayStations, Samsung 4K TVs, Legos and Shopkins, which Adobe found to be among the top-selling toys and electronics to those chasing online discounts.
And mobile shopping continued its surge as an increasingly popular way to browse and buy.
By late morning Monday, Adobe found that 56% of visits and 38% of sales occurred on tablets or smartphones, up from 53% and 32% respectively in 2015. Meanwhile, the National Retail
Federation said 23% of those shopping on Cyber Monday expected to do their browsing from their mobile gadgets, roughly the same number as in 2015.
The federation’s survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, found that 122 million consumers — 1 million more than last year — expected to shop on Cyber Monday. But like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is no longer a one-day affair, with some retailers kicking off their specials as early as Thanksgiving and extending them throughout the following week.
“The competition is who can be first with the deal to snag the sale before someone else does,’’ says Efraim Levy, senior equity analyst at CFRA.
But that extended sales period may diminish Cyber Monday’s standing as a singular, blockbuster event, like Black Friday, which is “not as important as it once had been,” Levy says.
Cyber Monday was created with online shopping in mind, and increasingly that’s becoming the preferred way of browsing.
More people shopped online between Thanksgiving Day and Sunday than in an actual store, with 43.8% using a smartphone, tablet or computer to peruse clothing, toys or other items, according to the NRF.
In-store traffic meanwhile, saw a drop. Preliminary data from analytics firm RetailNext showed that in-store net sales plunged 10.4% on Black Friday vs. last year, and traffic dipped 10.6%.