Cyber Monday sales expected to rise 12% to nearly $3B

Steven Loeb · November 30, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/41bf

The holiday weekend brought in a total of $11 billion in sales

While the definition of what Cyber Monday actually means is getting stretched beyond recognition, with retailers, like Walmart, now extending it to Sunday night, the fact remains: it has, in the last few years, become the biggest shopping day of the year.

This year's Cyber Monday is expected to increase by 12 percent over 2014, to bring in a total of $2.98 billion, according to projections from Adobe.

That would make it the largest day of the holiday weekend, beating out Thanksgiving Day's $1.73 billion and Black Friday's $2.74 billion. While Cyber Monday wins in total sales, it actually will have seen the lowest increase of all three, as Thanksgiving Day sales rose 25 percent, and Black Friday sales went up 14.3 percent.

Cyber Monday had the lowest average online spend, with $133 per customer, compared to $162 on Thanksgiving Day and $137 on Black Friday. It also had the lowest percentage of sales done on mobile, with 28 percent, compared to 37 percent on Thanksgiving Day and 33 percent on Black Friday. That should be expected, though, since the whole point of Cyber Monday is to get some shopping done when you're back at work, so there's no reason to be doing it on your phone. 

Tablet share of online sales declined this year, making up 15 percent of online sales on Thanksgiving, 13 percent on Black Friday, and 11 percent on Cyber Monday. 

In all, the three day weekend is expected to bring in a whopping $11 billion in sales.

Of course, the main reason for people doing their shopping on the holiday weekend is for the discounts, and this year 40 percent of online sales came from so-called "door-busters." Online discounts averaged 26% on Thanksgiving Day, slid down a drop to 24% on Black Friday, and was 20% on Cyber Monday.

The purpose of door busters is to get people to buy other merchandise, as well, while they are in shopping mode,” Tyler White, an analyst at ADI said in a statement. “But we’re seeing that people are buying just the discounted items and not so many other things.”

The origins of Cyber Monday started when people used their high speed Internet at work to go buy all the things they had missed over Thanksgiving weekend (clever bastards). Now it's become the largest shopping day in the United States. 

Last year a total of $2.038 billion was spent online through desktops alone on Cyber Monday, for a 17% gain from the year before. That total was a record breaker: it is the largest single shopping day in U.S. history, and was the first ever to break the $2 billion marker.

If actual sales are just a little higher than projected, this year will be the first to break $3 billion. 

(Image source: blog.credit.com)

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