The turkey is finished and all the relatives have gone home. We are all familiar with the Black Friday retail shopping and the ridiculous hours stores are open on the Friday after Thanksgiving, but in recent years another shopping holiday has been created, Cyber Monday. Beginning during the 2005 holiday season, the term was coined within the ecommerce community when data showed that the Monday following Thanksgiving was one of the biggest online shopping days of the year. Thus the term “Cyber Monday” was born and has been the catalyst to encourage online retailers to offer discounts and promotions to persuade people to shop online.
Since the creation of the holiday in 2005, comStore has been recording spending data on cyber Monday and keeping track to see the growth that has come from the relatively new online holiday. See this chart they made using the 2012 shopping data.
So far, comStore has only reported the 2013 Black Friday online purchase totals, but if these are any indication of what we expect to see after today, I think the Cyber Monday numbers are going to be very high. Here is the latest report on 2013 sales:
“Black Friday 2013 (November 29) saw $1.198 billion in desktop online sales, making it the season’s first billion dollar day and heaviest online spending day to date, while representing a 15-percent increase versus Black Friday 2012. Thanksgiving Day (November 28), while traditionally a lighter day for online holiday spending, achieved a strong 21-percent increase over Thanksgiving Day last year to $766 million. 66.1 million Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday using a desktop computer, representing an increase of 16 percent versus year ago. Amazon once again ranked as the most visited online retail site on Black Friday, followed by eBay, Walmart, Best Buy and Target. For the holiday season-to-date, Apparel & Accessories ranks as the leading product category for the season-to-date, accounting for 28 percent of online spending. Computer Hardware ranks #2 at 19 percent, followed by Consumer Electronics (7 percent), Consumer Packaged Goods (5 percent) and Shipping Services (5 percent).”
