The Podium
Blog posts tagged with 'Cyber Monday'
Tuesday, November 27
By Brad
Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal comes some good news for the economy:
It is estimated that this year’s Cyber Monday will be the biggest online shopping day of the year for the third year in a row. According to research firm comScore, Americans are expected to spend $1.5 billion, up 20% from last year on Cyber Monday, as retailers have ramped up their deals to get shoppers to click on their websites.
The WSJ report also looks at what’s helping drive the increase in Internet sales. Not surprisingly, it’s great access to broadband:
With the growth in high speed Internet access and the wide use of smartphones and tablets, people are relying less on their work computers to shop than they did when Shop.org, the digital division of trade group The National Retail Federation, introduced the term “Cyber Monday.”
“People years ago didn’t have…connectivity to shop online at their homes. So when they went back to work after Thanksgiving they’d shop on the Monday after,” said Vicki Cantrell, executive director of Shop.org. “Now they don’t need the work computer to be able to do that.”
Somewhat ironically, this increase of home broadband access will probably lead to Cyber Monday becoming less of an event.
Monday, November 26
By Brad
Speaking “Cyber Monday,” according to a new report from the organization Deepfield (via Barb Darrow of GigaOm), when it comes to online retail leaders, Amazon is still king of the mountain with 14% of retail traffic. In second place is Ebay with just under 9%, and Shopify is a distant third with 5.4%.
Monday, December 05
By Brad
The numbers are in on this year’s “Cyber Monday” online holiday shopping blitz, and as The Hill‘s Gautham Nagesh reports, they’re big:
While big business was expected on Cyber Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were also two of the four heaviest online spending days in history, at $1.12 billion and $1.03 billion, respectively. Combined with the bump in traditional retails sales, the figures show increased confidence from consumers ahead of the end of the year.
All told, e-commerce generated nearly $6 billion in sales last week.
Tuesday, November 29
By Brad
Yesterday was Cyber Monday, and it appears to have been a big success. How big? Over at TechCrunch, Leena Rao reports:
Cyber Monday online sales, according to IBM’s Coremetrics report, were up 33 percent over 2010, and up 29.3 percent over Black Friday.
IBM says that the average order amount was up 2.6 percent this year from $193.24 to $198.26. The shopping peaks during the day took place at 11:05am PST/2:05pm EST as well as after commuting hours on both the east and west coast.
Given ongoing economic concerns, this can only be counted as a big win all around.
Monday, November 28
By Brad
Today is “Cyber Monday,” the online equivalent of “Black Friday,” and business is expected to be brisk. But as Brendan Sasso of The Hill reports, customers will have a hard time connecting to some websites today:
The Justice Department and other federal agencies shut down 150 websites on Monday accused of selling copyrighted materials and counterfeit products.
The crackdown was timed to coincide with “Cyber Monday,” the most profitable day of the year for online retailers.
Speaking of today’s online shopping madness, over at GigaOm, Katie Fehrenbacher looks at the positive effect online holiday shopping has on the environment:
A couple years ago we commissioned a study for our subscription services GigaOM Pro on the greenhouses gas emissions of online holiday shopping versus in-store holiday shopping, and the trends still ring true. The study found that in-store purchases represented an increase of more than 15 times the green house gases of online purchases. Overall, the impact of Black Friday in 2009 was about 50 times that of Cyber Monday in 2009.
Tuesday, December 01
By Brad
Fox News reports that online retailers experienced a surge in traffic and sales yesterday:
By 6:30 p.m. Eastern time on so-called Cyber Monday, Web shoppers had spent, in total, 11% more than they did a year ago at that time, according to Coremetrics Inc., a Web analytics company that tracks shopper behavior on the sites of more than 500 U.S. brands.
With overall online sales up an estimated 6%, yesterday is expected to be the biggest online retail day ever.