Retailers from Wal-Mart Stores to Amazon started rolling out “Cyber” deals at the beginning of November, and kept them going. That led some to wonder if earlier sales would put a dent in Cyber Monday sales.
The date has been the biggest online shopping day of the year since 2010.
But shoppers delivered. In fact, shoppers bought online at the heaviest rate ever on Monday, according to research firm comScore Inc, which tracks online sales.
The group said e-commerce spending rose 18 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday to 1.74 billion USD, making Monday the top online spending day since comScore began tracking the data in 2001. The figure does not include purchases from mobile devices.
The strong online performance was in contrast to overall spending. Over the four days beginning on Thanksgiving, spending fell an estimated 2.9 percent to 57.4 billion USD, according to the trade group the National Retail Federation. Overall, the NRF expects holiday spending to rise 2.9 percent to 602.1 billion USD.
“Any notion that Cyber Monday is declining in importance appears to be completely unfounded,” comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement on Tuesday. “While it’s true that many retailers are bleeding their Cyber Monday promotions into the weekend before and the days afterward, Cyber Monday itself continues to be the most important day of the online holiday shopping season.”
However, he did say that early promotions had some consumers buying more items earlier in the weekend, suggesting that Cyber Monday could have even been stronger were it not for the emergence of this trend.
Consumer electronics and video game consoles and accessories were among the biggest sellers of the day. Home and garden products, clothing and accessories, as well as sports and fitness products also performed well.
ComScore tracks US online sales based on observed behavior of a representative US consumer panel of 1 million web users.
One big online shopping trend so far this year is shoppers researching and buying on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, said Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.
“There was an enormous lift in the number of people who use mobile devices, and it’s been trending that way for the last couple of weeks,” she said.
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