Shoppers spent $1.74B on Cyber Monday, up 18% over 2012

ComScore had predicted $2B in sales

It looks like Cyber Monday didn’t quite hit the lofty $2 billion mark comScore had originally projected, but it still reached record highs. ComScore reported late Tuesday that consumers spent $1.74 billion online on Cyber Monday, an increase of 18% over last year, when shoppers spent $1.47 billion online.

Caveat: that number only includes desktop sales, so that’s leaving out a sizable chunk of online purchases being made from smartphones and tablets. According to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark’s calculations, mobile accounted for 17% of all online sales on Cyber Monday.

While many brick-and-mortar retailers are gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair over the fact that this year saw the first Black Friday sales decline since 2009, online retailers had a fantastic weekend. All told, consumers spent a grand total of $5.3 billion online between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday. That’s up 22% over last year, when shoppers spent $4.3 billion across the entire Thanksgiving weekend.

And despite other firms’ findings that e-commerce got a strong push from mobile this year, comScore notes that half of all dollars spent online on Cyber Monday originated from work computers—49.2%, to be exact. That’s up more than two percentage points from last year, when 47.1% of all dollars spent online came from work computers.

ComScore revealed last weekend that consumers spent $1.2 billion online from desktop computers on Black Friday, up 15% over last year, when consumers spent $1.04 billion.

"Any notion that Cyber Monday is declining in importance appears to be completely unfounded as its strong year-over-year growth rate of 18 percent resulted in yet another record for online spending in a single day," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni, in a statement. 

That said, comScore had predicted that Cyber Monday sales would see a 20%+ increase over last year.

Meanwhile, purchases at physical stores were down 3% to $57.4 billion on Black Friday, according to the National Retail Federation. While more people were out shopping on Black Friday, the average shopper spent $407, a 4% decline over last year.

The lagging Black Friday sales have prompted many experts to conclude that this will be a meager holiday shopping season for retailers.

But Walmart seems to have made out okay. While not releasing hard numbers, Walmart announced yesterday that Cyber Monday 2013 was the biggest day of online sales in the company’s history. Between Thanksgiving Day and Cyber Monday, Walmart.com saw higher sales than in any other five-day stretch previously, and the company said that it “processed more than one billion page views” during that period.

ComScore has projected that this year, 25% of online holiday sales will take place on December 15 or later. 

Image source: cbsnewyork