CYBER MONDAY RAKES IN R134.5BN IN ONLINE SALES

US SHOPPERS spent $9.2 billion (R134.5bn) online on Cyber Monday – up 17 percent from a year ago and a record – boosting an already robust holiday shopping season. Spending fell just shy of Adobe’s forecast of $9.4bn. The company tracks transactions across 80 of the top 100 US online retailers, and it said four “golden hours of retail” from 10pm to 2am generated 30 percent of the day’s revenue as shoppers competed to snag the best deals. Extreme weather across the continental US gave consumers plenty of reason to shop from the coziness of their own homes. A storm that started in California barrelled across the nation and pummelled the Northeast just as Thanksgiving travellers were heading back from visiting family. While Cyber Monday remains the biggest online spending day of the year, shoppers increasingly favour buying online from the start of the holiday season, rather than waiting for the day’s specials, as they might have a few years ago. That’s in part as they transition to purchasing via mobile devices instead of from computers – often at the office after the holiday weekend. US shoppers will spend $135bn online in November and December, representing 13.4 percent of all holiday sales, up from 12.3 percent a year ago, said EMarketer. The shopping season is also shorter this year with six fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than last year. Adobe said big e-commerce platforms such as Amazon will benefit the most from the surge in sales. I Bloomberg