Online shopping was up 26.6 percent today compared with last year, according to figures released this evening.
An Amazon.com employee grabs boxes off the conveyor belt to load in a truck at their Fernley, Nev., warehouse. Cyber Monday, a term coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving when people returned to their work computers, was expected to be the year's biggest online shopping day for the third straight year.
Shoppers are expected to spend $1.5 billion on Cyber Monday, up 20 percent from last year, according to research firm comScore. That would not only make it the biggest online shopping day of the year, but the biggest since comScore started tracking shoppers’ online buying habits in 2001.
Online shopping was up 26.6 percent on Cyber Monday compared with the same time period a year ago, according to figures released this evening by IBM Benchmark, which tracks online sales. Sales from mobile devices, which include tablets, rose 10.2 percent. The group does not track dollar amount sales.
The strong start to Cyber Monday, a term coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed people were doing a lot of shopping on their work computers on the Monday following Thanksgiving, comes after overall online sales rose significantly during the four-day holiday shopping weekend that began on Thanksgiving.
“Online’s piece of the holiday pie is growing every day, and all the key dates are growing with it,” said Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “The Web is becoming a more significant part of the traditional brick-and-mortar holiday shopping season.”
It’s the latest sign that Americans are becoming addicted to the convenience of the Web. With the growth in smartphones and tablet computers, shoppers can buy what they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. As a result, retailers have ramped up the deals they’re offering on their websites during the holiday shopping season, a time when stores can make up to 40 percent of their annual revenue.
Amazon.com, which started its Cyber Monday deals at 12:01 a.m. today, is offering as much as 60 percent off a Panasonic VIERA 55-inch TV that’s usually priced higher than $1,000. Sears is offering $430 off a Maytag washer and dryer, each on sale for $399. And Kmart is offering 75 percent off all of its diamond earrings and $60 off a 12-in-1 multigame table on sale for $89.99.