Cyber Monday Sales Rocket to $6.6 Billion

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 5:59AM EST · Published Nov 27, 10:55PM EST

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Cyber Monday Sales Rocket to $6.6 Billion — © courtesy of Amazon.com Inc.

Cyber Monday sales, critical to e-commerce revenue for the holiday season, surged 16.8% to $6.59 billion, according to industry research. The data also show that total online sales have topped $1 billion every day in November.

According to Adobe Analytics, which tracks activity from 80 of the 100 largest e-commerce sites:

Cyber Monday is projected to hit a new record as the largest online sales day in history with $6.59 billion by the end of the day. This marks a 16.8 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase as of 10:00 p.m. ET. In comparison, Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day brought in $5.03 billion and $2.87 billion in revenue respectively.

The other notable information from Cyber Monday is the extent to which consumers have used smartphones to access retail sites this holiday season:

Overall web traffic to retail sites increased by 11.9 percent on Cyber Monday, with the season average at 5.7 percent. Mobile set a new record representing 47.4 percent of visits (39.9 percent smartphones, 7.6 percent tablets) and 33.1 percent of revenue (24.1 percent smartphones, 9.0 percent tablets). Smartphone traffic specifically grew 22.2 percent YoY while revenue coming from smartphones ($1.12 billion) saw 39.2 percent growth YoY, a new all-time high.

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This trend should worry already decimated brick-and-mortal retailers. In recent years, consumers have visited stores to look at merchandise only to shop online and buy products from e-commerce sites, particularly Amazon. The practice, known as showrooming, has been difficult to combat. Because they are portable, smartphones allow people to look at merchandise in stores and buy at better prices online, almost instantaneously. Mickey Mericle, Vice President, Marketing and Customer Insights at Adobe, said:

Shopping and buying on smartphones is becoming the new norm and can be attributed to continued optimizations in the retail experience on mobile devices and platforms. Consumers are also becoming more savvy and efficient online shoppers. People increasingly know where to find the best deals and what they want to purchase, which results in less price matching behavior typically done on desktops. Millennials were likely another reason for the dramatic growth in mobile, with 75 percent expecting to shop via their smartphone.

Toy retailers have another reason to be concerned because of the deep discounts they have to offer. Toys “R” Us recently filed Chapter 11. The Adobe data show just how troubling the toy discount problem has become:

Largest price drops heading into Cyber Monday were for toys with an average discount of 18.8 percent, followed by TVs at 21.1 percent and computers at 14.7 percent. Black Friday saw the largest discounts in computers (15.9 percent on average), followed by TVs (21.6 percent) and toys (17.3 percent). On Giving Tuesday, pet products as well as furniture and bedding are expected to see the best deals with 22 and 13 percent respectively

The trend is relentlessly negative for traditional retailers. People not only buy online. They also use online shopping to look for discounts while they stand on showroom floors. The brick-and-mortar retailers are left with almost no defense of their century-old business model.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.