Americans Spend Big on Cyber Monday, Sales up 33%

The economy may still be depressed and unemployment at close to nine percent, but you wouldn’t know it if you were an online retailer this past Monday. All meaningful metrics in an IBM report showed a huge surge in consumer spending on e-commerce websites on Cyber Monday and an even bigger increase in mobile shopping.

The term “Cyber Monday” was coined in 2006 by Shop.org, a division of the National Retail Federation, after a study found that 77 percent of e-commerce merchants reported a significant increase in their sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving. A CyberMonday.com website was then launched to help shoppers find deals.

Cyber Monday Sales up by a Third from Last Year

That is the headline news out of IBM’s report. The strong results followed record-high Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales, we learn. Here are the main statistics:

The mobile shopping statistics were even more impressive:

Apple Users Lead the Way

Users of Apple’s iPhone and iPad were the top mobile shoppers, accounting for a total of 7.4 percent of all online retail traffic on Cyber Monday and 10.2 percent on Black Friday, the data show. Here is how users of Apple’s gadgets compared to Android-using shoppers:

We also learn that iPad users made more purchases than users of any other device with conversion rate of 5.2 percent compared to an overall average of 2.99 percent for the mobile segment.

Americans Spend $52.5 Billion this Thanksgiving Shopping Weekend

That is what a survey conducted for the National Retail Federation tells us. Here is how this year’s Thanksgiving shopping weekend compared to the ones in recent past:

As you see, both the number of Thanksgiving shoppers and the average spending amount have seen solid increases in the past two years, despite the unending crisis.

The Takeaway

Cyber Monday has quickly become one of the biggest shopping days of the year and, with mobile shopping still in its infancy and traffic growing by more than 200 percent, we are likely to see even more impressive numbers next year. It would also help if the economy begins to grow at a healthier rate and unemployment falls at least a bit.