Cyber Monday hit a new record of $3.45 billion spent online, a 12.1% increase over 2015, Adobe Digital Insights reported, making it the largest U.S. online sales day in history. The final tally was 2.6% above Adobe’s original prediction. For the entire “weekend” – Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday – the tally was $12.81 billion, Adobe said, 15.2% higher than $11.1 billion in 2015.
Cyber Monday easily edged out Black Friday’s total of $3.34 billion in sales, according to Adobe.
Even with the growth, yesterday’s total was dwarfed by Alibaba Group’s Singles Day 2016 in China, which generated $17.8 billion in one-day sales, or more than five times the Cyber Monday results.
“Cyber Monday was one for the history books,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analysts for Adobe Digital Insights. “Consumers converted carts into purchases at record levels before the season, and likely the year’s lowest price deals ended. It’s also incredible that Black Friday inched so close to Cyber Monday, generating only $110 million less in online sales. We’ll be watching this closely next year as Black Friday could be the one to top the records.”
Mobile spending on Cyber Monday started strong early in the day but slowed in the evening hours, according to Adobe, generating $1.07 billion in sales. This was a 34% increase over 2015 but $130 million less than on Black Friday.
Since Nov. 1 – the new start date for holiday season activity – there has been $39.97 billion spent online, a 7.6% increase from last year. Given the strong performance of ecommerce over Cyber Weekend, Adobe is predicting $91.6 billion in sales by the end of the year, which would be a 10.4% increase over $83 billion in 2015.
Other Cyber Weekend statistics based on Adobe’s Marketing Cloud data:
- Mobile accounted for 47% of visits to retail websites, with smartphones accounting for the lion’s share at 38% and tablets at 9%. Thirty-one percent of sales came from smartphones (22%) and tablets (9%).
- Conversions were well above holiday averages, with smartphones at 2.8%, tablets at 5.1% and desktops at 6.3%; the average figures are 1.3%, 2.9% and 3.2%, respectively.
- The average order value on iOS smartphones was $141, which was slightly higher compared to Android smartphones at $128.
- Top-selling electronics on Cyber Monday included Sony PlayStation 4, Microsoft Xbox, Samsung 4K TVs, Apple iPhone and Amazon Fire devices. Lego sets, Nerf, Shopkins, Barbie and Pie Face Game were the top-selling toys. Not surprisingly, all of these items were most likely to generate out-of-stock notices. Out-of-stock messages were at 12%, 0.5% less than 2015 and 1.5% higher than on Black Friday.
- The best category for deals was televisions, with an average discount of 21.4%, followed by tablets (21.1%), toys (14.6%), pet care (11.8%) and computers (11.1%). From Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, Adobe found the percentage of products with the same price across multiple retailers increased from 26% in 2015 to 32% in 2016, showing more price matching and more consumers taking advantage of it.
- The top promotional drivers were search ads, accounting for 38.5% of sales, and direct sales (25.3%), representing the majority of Cyber Monday revenue. “Shopper helper” sites like CNET and RetailMeNot drove 16% of sales and email drove another 18.1%.