Cyber Monday clocks record sales as mobile sales surge
NEW YORK — Quick thumbs tapping across mobile keyboards helped make Cyber Monday the largest U.S. online sales day ever.
The latest data show significantly more people are comfortable not only browsing, but buying products on their smartphones, fundamentally changing the way retailers clock sales during the busiest shopping period of the year.
Mobile traffic accounted for nearly half of all online traffic and 27.6% of all online sales Monday, which is up more than 25% from last year, according to IBM Watson Trend, which tracks millions of transactions on retail websites. Online sales increased 17.8% Monday compared to the same day in 2014, IBM says. Consumers made bigger-ticket purchases on desktop, though, with an average order value of $128 vs. about $102 on smartphones.
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Another report shows Cyber Monday sales topped $3 billion, up 16% from last year, according to Adobe data, which is based on 200 million visits to 4,500 retail sites.
Many retailers made a more deliberate effort this year to put online and in-store deals on equal footing, such as making Cyber Monday deals available early, rolling them out over the weekend as shoppers were still in a Black Friday buying frenzy. Some Black Friday deals were available online hours before retailers made them available in stores last week.
Mobile apps also played a bigger role , such as the expansion of Target's partnership with the app Curbside, which allows customers to place an order and pick it up at a Target store without leaving their car.
"It's a total shift that's happening," says Krish Mantripragada, senior vice president of information and analytics solutions at First Data, another company that tracks merchant sales. "People can pretty much get the same deals and breadth of coverage online they would have otherwise only gotten in stores a few years ago."
Shares in the major retailers failed to get much of a pop from the strong long-weekend sales. Walmart (WMT) shares have lost 2% since the end of trading Wednesday, while Target shares (TGT) have shed 0.5%. Amazon (AMZN) shares are up 0.6%.
Still, given sales have become much more spread out — starting in some cases a week or two before Thanksgiving — and more people are buying online, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are not the ultimate indicator of holiday season sales, says Brian Yarbrough, consumer analyst with Edward Jones. He still expects holiday season sales to increase 2.5% from last year.
"Black Friday has been kind of inconsistent as far as predicting holiday sales," he says. "You can't read into just one weekend."
Online shopping can often trump store visits by giving consumers the freedom to shop whenever they want without leaving the house. First Data found that online sales showed consistently positive growth vs. last year at all hours of the day throughout Thanksgiving and Black Friday. At stores, sales dipped in the early morning and late evening hours.
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Cyber Monday shoppers mainly went after electronics, including TVs, tablets and the Apple Watch. Star Wars toys were also a top seller all weekend at retailers including Walmart. Walmart also said that customers are making purchases on mobile at a higher rate than in the past. Nearly half of its online orders since Thanksgiving were made on from a mobile device, double the number last year, the company said Tuesday.
Many retailers are continuing to offer online deals all week, hoping to capture consumer dollars well after the frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
A fuller picture of how the holiday season went will come early next year, when the National Retail Federation puts out a final report and retailers start reporting fourth-quarter earnings results.