USA Today writes that initial reports suggest that Cyber Monday - the online version of Black Friday - was an enormous success: "The numbers are mind-boggling. As of 6 p.m. Eastern time, overall sales were up 17.5% on Cyber Monday compared with last year, says IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. Another e-commerce research company, Custora Pulse, found online sales up almost 19%. The numbers may shift even higher as people continue to shop through the evening."
Bloomberg reports that "retailers catering to smartphone and tablet users benefited the most, with mobile traffic accounting for 30 percent of the total site visits, an increase of more than 58 percent from last year, IBM said.
"The results deliver another blow to physical stores, which just suffered the first spending decline on a Black Friday weekend since 2009. Web sales this holiday season are projected to climb as much as 15 percent to $82 billion, more than three times faster than total retail growth of 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion, the said. Mobile devices drove 16 percent of online purchases, IBM said."
And, Bloomberg adds: "Retailers like Seattle-based Amazon are chasing e-commerce holiday revenue that Forrester (FORR) Research Inc. projects to rise 15 percent to $78.7 billion. Online spending increased 15 percent to a record $1.2 billion on Black Friday, according to research by ComScore Inc."
Bloomberg reports that "retailers catering to smartphone and tablet users benefited the most, with mobile traffic accounting for 30 percent of the total site visits, an increase of more than 58 percent from last year, IBM said.
"The results deliver another blow to physical stores, which just suffered the first spending decline on a Black Friday weekend since 2009. Web sales this holiday season are projected to climb as much as 15 percent to $82 billion, more than three times faster than total retail growth of 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion, the said. Mobile devices drove 16 percent of online purchases, IBM said."
And, Bloomberg adds: "Retailers like Seattle-based Amazon are chasing e-commerce holiday revenue that Forrester (FORR) Research Inc. projects to rise 15 percent to $78.7 billion. Online spending increased 15 percent to a record $1.2 billion on Black Friday, according to research by ComScore Inc."
- KC's View:
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What's really interesting about this is that Cyber Monday was sort of created for a time when most people only had high-speed internet access at work, so that's why they'd do their online shopping on Monday. These days, almost everybody has access to broadband, which changes everything … and yet the Cyber Monday marketing machine still seems to be working.
Though it isn;t just Cyber Monday on which people are shopping online … the National Retail federation (NRF) says that 44 percent of Black Friday sales actually took place online.
Yikes.
