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Friday 2 December 2011

US Cyber Monday online spending soars by 33% over 2010: IBM

Monday was the biggest online shopping day in history.Monday was the biggest online shopping day in history.
The final numbers for holiday gift shopping on Cyber Monday are rolling in, and online sales beat early expectations, making Monday the biggest online shopping day on record.
ComScore, which on Monday said it expected the day to end with $1.2 billion in sales, said on Tuesday that online shoppers spent $1.3 billion, a 22 percent increase from last year, at that time the biggest online shopping day of the year. IBM Benchmark, which on Monday said sales were up 15 percent, said on Tuesday that by the end of the day, online spending had climbed 33 percent.
Cyber Monday was invented by Shop.org, an industry association, in recognition of the fact that people shop online when they are at work. But now that most people carry computers in their pockets in the form of smartphones, they are using those to make purchases, perhaps at lunch or under the conference table in a meeting. Many also waited until they left work to buy, accounting for the late-day spike in sales.
On PayPal, for instance, people shopped on their phones most heavily from 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern time — most likely after they left work. IBM said online shopping overall on Monday peaked around 2 p.m. Eastern time, around lunch break for shoppers across the country.
Almost 90 percent of shoppers told the National Retail Federation they would use their home computers to shop on Monday (though such results should be taken with a grain of salt, since people might not want to acknowledge their in-office shopping habits). Fourteen percent said they would use mobile devices to shop, up from 7 percent last year.
One reason that mobile shopping increased so much this year is that more e-commerce companies have embraced tablets like the iPad, which are better than tiny phones for shopping. More e-commerce sales came from iPads than any other mobile device on Monday, IBM Benchmark found, with 5.2 percent of iPad shoppers making a purchase. At eBags, for instance, tablet shoppers on average spent $13 more than phone shoppers and $7 more than computer shoppers, said Peter Cobb, its co-founder and senior vice president.
EBags finished Monday with sales up 49 percent over last year, a record. Nearly 8 percent of those sales came from mobile devices — 6.5 percent from tablets and 1.4 percent from smartphones. That compared to 3.9 percent of sales last year. At Etsy, the marketplace for handmade goods, where Monday’s sales increased more than 80 percent over last year, people visited the site on mobile phones over Thanksgiving weekend 4.5 times more than last year. PayPal processed six times the volume of mobile payments Monday as it did in 2010, and mobile shoppers spent 2.5 times as much on eBay.
But despite the increase in mobile shopping on Monday, people shopped more on their mobile devices on Thanksgiving and on Black Friday — when they were probably not near computers because they were with their families or in line at malls for sales.
On Monday, 10.8 percent of e-commerce sites’ traffic came from mobile devices, compared with 14.3 percent on Friday, and 6.6 percent of Monday’s sales came from mobile devices versus 9.8 percent on Friday, according to IBM Benchmark. But over all, mobile shopping on Monday increased notably over last year, when just 3.9 percent of visits and 2.3 percent of sales came from mobile devices, IBM said.

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