Cyber Monday Sales Up 21%
Store traffic and sales were up a bit as shoppers opened the holiday shopping season on Black Friday, but average sales per customer were down slightly. According to the National Retail Foundation, traffic at stores last weekend was up 4.8 percent but the average amount spent dropped 3.5 percent, probably due to fewer big ticket TV sales. Although sales are still ahead of last year, the media coverage was surprisingly negative, possibly affecting consumer confidence (and the stock market isn’t helping either.)
Now data from the opening of the online shopping season shows a similar trend, with the exception that traffic is up much more dramatically. A study by comScore reports that Cyber Monday sales were up 21 percent to $733 million this year. The number of buyers online during the day rose 38 percent from one year ago but the average per-customer purchase fell 12 percent.
Major online retailers did well this year. According to comScore, Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target were the top three website destinations for consumers. According to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index, traffic to top retail websites on Cyber Monday rose 26 percent over 2006. CyberMonday.com received more than 1.5 million unique visitors on Cyber Monday alone, five times more than one year ago. Although there is some debate about the concept of Cyber Monday, especially since several other online shopping days are more important, the concept has legs. Internet service provider Akamai reported that its metrics for 300 monitored retail sites yielded 4.6 million visitors per second, making it the single largest day of Internet retail traffic in 3 years.
Several online jewelry retailers reported big sales boosts on Monday. At Diamond.com, traffic rose 58 percent and sales increased 65 percent. At Ice.com, with a discount offer, traffic was up 70 percent and sales increased 82 percent.
But there’s much more to come, of course: as of Sunday, November 26, the average person has completed 36.4 percent of their holiday shopping, the same as last year at this time, the NRF says. One in 12 has finished their holiday shopping. (And of course, we hate them.)
In support of this article, I can confirm that our 4 year old online jewelry and gemstone business http://www.lapigems.com experienced a significant 43% increase in traffic and 22% increase in sales on cyber Monday. So it is not just the major online retailers that benefitted but a cross section of smaller ones too. The phenomenon of cyber Monday is a real boost to online etailers.