The clock only just ran out on Cyber Monday, but early data shows the online shopping bonanza saw a robust increase in sales this year.
Adobe forecasts that Cyber Monday sales hit $2.65 billion on Monday, a 16 percent increase over last year. The technology company projects that large retailers had the healthiest bumps in sales: The top 25 retailers in the U.S. saw 25 percent year-over-year online sales growth on Monday, while smaller retailers had growth of only 5 percent.
The growth for Cyber Monday was outpaced by the sales growth for the broader period of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, which Adobe said had a 20 percent increase in online sales. This may be an indication that online shoppers are no longer holding out in hope that Monday is their best chance for digital deals. It seems the offers on Thursday and Friday were enticing enough to get them to open their wallets. Adobe analyzed 400 million visits to 4,500 retail Web sites to make its projections.
IBM also monitored online traffic and transactions throughout Monday. In its last update at 6 p.m. Eastern time, IBM reported that online sales were up 8.1 percent over 2013. IBM is to release a full report on its findings in the morning.
The relatively strong Cyber Monday results come on the heels of recent data that showed healthy online sales growth on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. IBM's real-time tracking index of digital shopping found that online sales on Thanksgiving were up 14.3 percent over the previous year, while Black Friday online sales rose 9.5 percent.
IBM also examined just how much browsing and buying are done on a desktop computer versus a smartphone or a tablet. Desktop PCs still account for the majority of online traffic and an even greater share of online sales. Desktops represented 62 percent of all online traffic and 80 percent of sales. Consumers' average order value was also highest on desktop.
Smartphones, meanwhile, accounted for 28 percent of total online traffic, and yet only represented 9.3 percent of total online sales. So, at least for now, smartphones appear to be much more popular for browsing and price-checking than for completing a purchase.
Tablets, it seems, are used differently. They only accounted for 10 percent of all online traffic, and yet they represented 11 percent of online sales. So tablet shoppers are closing the deal much more frequently than smartphone shoppers.
Again, it should be noted that IBM's data so far only accounts for shopping patterns for the day up to 6 p.m. However, the shopping behavior on PCs, smartphones and tablets is similar to what Adobe observed on Thanksgiving and Black Friday.
Post By http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2014/12/02/a-solid-sales-lift-for-cyber-monday-according-to-early-data/
0 comments Blogger 0 Facebook
Post a Comment