Cyber Monday Joins the Record-Breaking Flood
It’s been quite a Thanksgiving weekend, looking back on the numbers. We found Thanksgiving to be rife with mobile and online shoppers, and an increasingly large amount of folks stayed out of the various in-store brawls on Black Friday to shop online instead. Now we find that the day devoted to online shopping—Cyber Monday—turned out to be a record-breaker in its own right.
Not only did Cyber Monday set records for Cyber Monday—according to word from Adobe Analytics—but Cyber Monday also set records period. It turns out that Cyber Monday 2017 was the largest-ever day for online shopping the United States had ever seen, bringing in $6.6 billion in sales all by itself. Just by 10 AM, online shoppers had clocked in a whopping $840 million, which was up 17 percent from the previous year by itself.
That was before the peak time of online shopping, between 8 PM and 11 PM. Those three hours alone actually accounted for more activity than an average 24-hour day could pull in. Cyber Monday was also projected to be larger than the Black Friday sales figures, which were put around $5 billion. Thanksgiving pulled in $2.8 billion, as did “Super Sunday”, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. Even Small Business Saturday saw success at $2.5 billion.
The clear winner in all this shopping is—you guessed it—Amazon, who will by itself account for between 45 and 50 percent of all sales by volume. However, a good chunk of that will be going to the various third-party sellers on the site, leaving Amazon with about 24 percent of online shopping share. That in itself is up from last year’s 20 percent.
Given that I too do most of my Christmas shopping on Amazon—a local vintner is about the only exception—I can understand where this came from. Shopping on Amazon is an ultra-convenient experience that opens up a staggering amount of goods to the shopper. All that’s required is enough foresight to do the shopping far enough ahead of Christmas to let the goods arrive via delivery, since delivery times are online’s only real weakness.
Cyber Monday demonstrated as much clearly, but since every other part of Thanksgiving also had online shopping, it just had the point driven home like a railspike through a Jell-o mold.