Cyber Monday poised to break online sales record
Cyber Monday is a mere 12 years old, but the online shopping day has become the cornerstone of the holiday shopping season. And for the second year in a row, Cyber Monday is poised to best Black Friday in overall sales to become the biggest online shopping day in history.
As of mid Monday morning, consumers had spent an estimated$840 million online, representing 16.9 percent growth year over year, according to data from Adobe Digital Insights. As of 4:30 pm EST, shoppers spent an estimated $3.38 billion making purchases online.
The day is projected to break $6.6 billion in sales before midnight.
Adobe's calculations are based on data from 23 billion visits to retail websites: the company measures 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 US retailers, and said that three quarters of spending online with the top 500 US retailers goes through its Adobe Marketing Cloud.
"Cyber Monday is expected to make history again as the biggest U.S. online shopping day of all time, driving a billion dollars more than last year," said Tamara Gaffney, Strategic Insights engagement group director at Adobe. "As consumers make their way back to work, they are poised to be hitting the buy button all day, as most big discounts will end by midnight. A lot more of this will be happening on smartphones as well, where smoother buying experiences through auto-fill capabilities are helping drive the growth we see in mobile."
Overall, more consumers are spending their holiday shopping budget online instead of in-store. Adobe's data showed that a record $5.03 billion was spent online by the end of Black Friday, an increase of nearly 17 percent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, research firm ShopperTrak found that shopper visits to brick-and-mortar stores declined a combined 1.6 percent on Thanksgiving evening and Black Friday when compared to the same days in 2016.
We'll have the full picture for Cyber Monday once the data becomes available tomorrow.
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