Related Cyber Weekend News |
All sorts of sales records were set on Cyber Monday 2015, and it didn’t break the Internet (okay, so it did break for a few ecommerce retailers). Several sources are reporting all-time Cyber Monday highs.
IBM reports that consumers took advantage of Cyber Monday holiday deals. Online sales for Cyber Monday were up 17.8% over the same day in 2014, per the IBM Watson Trend app.
IBM says consumers continued to shop Cyber Monday via their mobile devices as they have all Cyber Weekend, and that mobile traffic nearly matched that of the desktop, accounting for 47.9% of all online traffic, an increase of 16.3% over 2014. Mobile sales were also strong, with 27.6% of all online sales coming from mobile devices, an increase of nearly 25.7% over last year.
Smartphones remained the Cyber Monday shopper’s device of choice, according to the IBM Watson Trend app. Smartphones accounted for 36.8% of all online traffic, more than three times that of tablets at 11.1%. Smartphones surpassed tablets in sales, driving 15.2% of online sales (up nearly 70% over 2014) versus tablets at 12.4%.
IBM says smartphone shoppers spent $102.02 per order. But with consumers returning to work, desktop claimed the highest average order value of $128.00, followed closely by tablets at $124.14.
At about 8 p.m. EST on Cyber Monday, Adobe said record $2.98 billion will be spent by end of day, which is 12% more than in 2014, the largest U.S. online sales day in history. Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday will drive a total of $11 billion in online sales, a 15% increase year over year and 30% of all online sales in November ($39.5 billion).
Adobe says the first 18 days in December are all expected to be $1 billion sales days. Brick-and-click retailers saw the strongest growth in sales year over year with 18%, reversing the trend of Cyber Monday being an online-only retailer day.
Adobe’s report is based on aggregated and anonymous data from more than 125 million visits to 4,500 retail websites on Cyber Monday and uses its predictive model to forecast the remaining hours of the day. Adobe measures 80% of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers.
The Custora E-Commerce Pulse, a free online dashboard providing key US e-commerce statistics and benchmarking data from 200+ online retailers, 500 million anonymous shoppers, shows that ecommerce revenue was up 16.2% over Cyber Monday 2014. Orders grew 14.7% and average order value was up 1.3%, indicating a less promotion-driven Cyber Monday than last year.
Custora adds that 75.5% of all mobile orders were made on Apple devices, while only 24.2% happened on Android devices. Email marketing was the primary channel driving online sales, accounting for 22.1% of transactions, while social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, etc.) only drove 1.5% of sales.
Bizrate Insights, a division of Connexity, says 50% of online Cyber Monday buyers reported shopping on a mobile device, up 16% from last year when only 37% reported shopping on Cyber Monday with a mobile device. 41% of online buyers expect Cyber Monday, to be their biggest online shopping day of the year. This is up from 39% on Cyber Monday last year.
Bizrate Insights reported that 36% of Cyber Monday online shoppers belong to a shipping club, up from 28% Cyber Monday last year. Two-thirds (67%) of shipping club members this Cyber Monday reported heavier shopping at the retailer for which they are a member, versus 60% last year. Amazon is the leading shipping club and stands to win the most from this trend.
Speaking of Amazon, ChannelAdvisor says its clients’ Cyber Monday sales on Amazon grew 21.1% over last year.
Mobile made up more than 70% of traffic to Walmart.com, nearly half of its orders since Thanksgiving have been placed on a mobile device – that’s double compared to last year, says Fernando Madeira, President and CEO of Walmart.com.
“Mobile firmly established itself as the dominant shopping trend, for both traffic and sales,” says Madeira. “Our customers went from previously mostly searching and browsing on mobile, to making purchases at a much higher rate.”
Cyber Weekend ecommerce growth has come at the expense of bricks-and-mortar. But while mainstream headlines today carry the message of doom and gloom for retailers, RetailNext Inc., which calculates retail analytics for brick-and-mortar stores, says the sales and traffic numbers only tell a partial story: Retailers with strong digital businesses saw an uptick in the online channels that will positively impact the overall performance of the brand.
“The weekend continued to demonstrate the emergence and importance of mobile shopping, and shoppers increasingly used digital devices to shop brands, research products, compare pricing and make purchases,” says Shelley E. Kohan, vice president of retail consulting at RetailNext. “The results for physical retail are generally positive when considering the growing influence of digital shopping, particularly in the mobile channel.”
Yesterday, Kohl’s expected more than 25% of Kohls.com items to be fulfilled by stores either through buy online, pick up in store or ship from store.
Amobee Brand Intelligence analyzed the digital content engagement around Cyber Monday to find the retailers and brands that were most successful during the buying holiday. There were 783,144 tweets around Cyber Monday on November 30. Twitter sentiment around those tweets was 24% positive, 69% neutral, and 7% negative.
HookLogic saw a dip in overall mobile traffic on Cyber Monday as shopping occurred at work and home rather than on the go, with mobile shopping coming in at 46 percent and desktop at 54%. Mobile traffic was highest at 6 a.m. EST on Cyber Monday as many shoppers browsed from bed before the workday began.
Conversion rates, defined by HookLogic as product detail page views resulting in sales, were highest from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. EST on Cyber Monday, making that hour the biggest hour in online shopping history. This is the exact same time the peak occurred the last two years as shoppers finished up their workday, and were ready to make purchases.
As for Internet blips, few outages were reported. Customer response to Target’s 15% off everything promotion caused an outage at 10 a.m. EST. The desktop site was mostly working again by 4 p.m. EST, according to Catchpoint Systems, but mobile load times were still taking as long as 21 seconds to load. Native mobile apps were also affected, though Catchpoint was not sure to what extent.
A few other shopping sites, including Footlocker, were also struggling with slow load times due to problematic 3rd party elements within their sites on Cyber Monday. Catchpoint noted that Groupon and Victoria’s Secret also experienced brief outages or slowdowns on Cyber Monday.
Even though Black Friday was a very strong online conversion day for advertisers, Rakuten Marketing says Cyber Monday outperformed Black Friday revenue by 40% across advertisers running display campaigns.
Click through rates on Cyber Monday were 13% higher on display ads than on Black Friday, and sales from mobile made up 28% of Rakuten Marketing’s display clients revenue: of that, smartphones accounted for 17%, tablets 11%.