TMCnet News
Cyber Monday record could be beat before holiday shopping endsNov 27, 2012 (San Jose Mercury News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- After setting a record for online sales, Cyber Monday might be matched in the weeks leading up to Christmas. With shoppers now clearly accustomed to buying online and retailers used to offering online deals, Jim Barkow, CEO and co-founder of Longboard Media, says there could be another day -- or even two -- in December that exceed Monday's record-setting online sales. "This year is fantastic and it's possible that a few days could surpass Cyber Monday," Barkow said. "There are more deals to come and people are buying more online. It's a combination of those very simple factors." Lelah Manz, chief strategist for commerce at Akamai Technologies, was a bit more cautious about whether any single shopping day can beat Cyber Monday sales this year. "Cyber Monday the last two years has been the biggest day of the season for online sales," Manz said. "However, we may see a series of back-to-back days that drive far more sales than this past Thanksgiving weekend in aggregate. The week before Christmas, including Free Shipping Day, has the potential to be the heaviest week of the online shopping season." Akamai found that online traffic peaked at 9 p.m. Monday with a record-breaking 8.5 million page views per minute. Cyber Monday purchasing raced past a typical fall day by 193 percent and beat Black Friday online sales by 49 percent, according to Akamai. According to data released Tuesday by IBM, Cyber Monday sales grew 30.3 percent over last year. As of midnight Monday, online sales were up more than 36 percent compared with Web shopping on Black Friday. The research firm comScore had forecast this month that Cyber Monday would represent the biggest online shopping day ever, with sales likely to exceed $1.5 billion. But comScore officials Tuesday did not respond to requests for comment from this newspaper. While IBM believes that online shoppers prefer to use PCs and laptops, it found that more than 18 percent of consumers used a mobile device to visit a retail site, up more than 70 percent from 2011. Sales on mobile devices were nearly 13 percent of all online purchases, representing an increase of more than 96 percent over 2011. Of shoppers using handheld devices, 58.1 percent used smartphones, compared with 41.9 percent who used tablets. Contact Dan Nakaso at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/dannakaso. ___ (c)2012 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |