Cyber Monday Online Shopping Breaks Records

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Researchers from several firms are reporting that this year’s Cyber Monday, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, set new records for online shopping. Shoppers spent more money than ever before, and they did a greater percentage of that shopping from mobile devices.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Danielle Kucera reported, “Online spending rose 17 percent on the Monday after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest days of the year for Internet retailers, as tablets and smartphones let customers shop anytime and anywhere. Consumers spent about $1.46 billion on so-called Cyber Monday, compared with $1.25 billion a year ago, making it the heaviest online spending day in history, research firm ComScore Inc. (SCOR) said in a statement today. U.S. retail e-commerce spending reached $16.4 billion in the first 26 days of the holiday season, a 16 percent increase from the same time last year.”

TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden added, “What’s interesting is that while Black Friday sales are buoyed in part by people having the day off work in the U.S., Cyber Monday is big precisely because it’s online, and so it becomes easier for people to shop while in the office. comScore notes that this is the first year, however, that spend from home and university computers outweighed spend from work computers at 47.2% compared to 47.1%. It also says that international users — perhaps more concerned about the economy and the price of long-distance shipping — spent about 1 percentage point less, accounting for 5.7% of sales.”

Computerworld’s Sharon Gaudin cited two other studies, “The Adobe Digital Index, which tracks online spending, said that online sales totaled some $1.98 billion Monday, a 17% increase over Cyber Monday online sales last year. An IBM analysis of Cyber Monday sales echoed Adobe’s findings, also finding that yesterday was the biggest online sales day ever. The IBM analysis showed that 2012 Cyber Monday sales were 30.3% more than last year, though its report lacked dollar figures.” She added, “According to IBM’s report, about 13% of total Cyber Monday online sales were done via mobile devices, 96% more than last year.”

PCMag’s Angela Moscaritolo noted that not all of that online shopping was holiday-related. She wrote, “According to market research firm The NPD Group, 40.9 percent of consumers purchased non-holiday items for themselves over the past few days. Interestingly, those who picked up tech products were 50 percent more likely than the overall shopping population to buy for themselves, NPD reported. More than 58 percent of tech buyers purchased items for themselves over the holiday weekend.”