Mobile Dominates Cyber Monday

This year Cyber Monday broke records with mobile sales reaching $2 billion in 24 hours. Online transactions overall broke records at $6.59 billion according to Adobe Insights. This marks a 16.8% increase from last year. Cyber Monday is officially the giant of online shopping in all of US history. Will next year beat this record?

Mobiles are the device of choice for online shopping with smartphone shopping dominating morning and afternoon sales. Desktop shopping rose in the evening once people were back at home.

Let’s break it down:

Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday was marked by a frenzy of online shopping starting in the early hours of the day. According to Adobe, consumers spent $840 million by 10 a.m. Monday.  By the end of Cyber Monday online sales broke records at $6.59 billion. Smartphones and tablets made up the majority of traffic and a significant chunk of revenue.

Mobile Dominates

There is a clear shift underway from desktop shopping to shopping from mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). This change in consumer behaviour includes using these devices for researching products and making purchases. Salesforce states that this holiday weekend, 64% of shopping visits were mobile, which is a 54% increase from the previous year. In terms of sales, mobile comprised 43% of orders, a 10% increase from last year.

Small retailers on top of mobile

Surprisingly, the largest rate of mobile conversions does not come from big brands. Smaller retailers who make $10 million or less convert twice the amount compared to bigger retailers who make over $100 million.

Messages Galore

It is common practice for retailers to send huge numbers of emails and other notifications to promote deals, especially time-sensitive ones, around the holidays.

On Black Friday, not counting the rest of the holiday weekend, retailers sent:

• Nearly 3 billion emails
• Over 82 million SMS & push notifications
• Collected 8 billion data points (eg. Email sign-ups)

But it’s not just Cyber Monday that broke online sales records this year. A record $5.03 billion was spent online on Black Friday, a 17% increase from last year. Small Business Saturday and Sunday netted $5.12 billion in online sales, a 10% increase from last year, according to Adobe. As more consumers are spending online, many large stores such as Target, Walmart and Toys R Us ramp up online deals before Thanksgiving to prepare for the deluge of online shopping.

Conclusion

So, what do these figures tell us? Shoppers are gaining more comfort with their mobile devices and retailers are optimizing for mobile. This conjunct of the two intertwined trends is likely to spur mobile sales to even greater heights in the future. Have you developed a mobile app for your e-commerce store? It’s not too late if you haven’t. Mobile sales are only set to grow and there’s always next year.