How high did online holiday sales reach on Cyber Monday?
If online purchases of $434 million transacted on Black Friday are an indicator, Cyber Monday buys may add up to more than the $600 million in spending projected by comScore Networks prior to Thanksgiving weekend. That’s because cyberspending last Friday gained 42 percent over outlays on the comparable day in 2005, while comScore’s earlier projection for spending on Monday was pegged to growth at a rate of 24 percent.
Gains at a 42 percent clip, for example, would push Cyber Monday purchasing to $687 million from $484 million last year.
“I’m wondering whether the increase will be higher than expected, given what we saw Friday and how aggressive the [Cyber Monday] promotions are,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks. Internet measurement services, including comScore, Nielsen/Net Ratings and Hitwise, said they expected to have tallied how much consumers spent Monday in cyberspace starting today through Thursday.
Although about three-quarters of Internet users have high-speed broadband connections at home, most of them still haven’t shifted their online shopping there from work, fueling the Cyber Monday phenomenon, Fulgoni noted. Last year, more than half of all holiday purchasing online, 58 percent, was transacted in the workplace, he said.
Cyber Monday is also one of those days, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group, when “consumers who went out shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend will go online to see how well they did in bargainland, and the people who heard about all the deals their friends got can go check it out for themselves.”
While much of the early holiday buying buzz has swirled around hard-to-find items like TMX Elmo and PlayStation 3, Cohen expects apparel will be the season’s best-selling gift, bought online or off. “The biggest disadvantage for apparel online is you can’t touch it or try it on, but as a gift for someone else, these things are neutralized,” he observed.
At walmart.com on Monday, a cashmere scarf for $16.78 was one of a handful of bestsellers, which included an Emerson 16-inch portable DVD player at $138.76 and a Philips 3-megapixel camera at $49. The Monday after Thanksgiving is likely to bring the Wal-Mart dot-com its fifth-biggest take of the year, a company spokesman said; the site had 60 percent more shoppers visit it Monday than did so on the comparable day last year.
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When asked which apparel Web sites he expects to be hottest this holiday, Cohen cited those of J.C. Penney (“They’ve ramped up the site, made it easier to use”), Ann Taylor (“They have bigger, bolder prints and [neutral] colors easily translated online”), Abercrombie & Fitch and American Eagle. The latter two ought to be busy, he said, because they are aspirational brands for the style driven, 11- to 24-year-old crowd.
Forecasts for Cyber Monday are numerous and varied, with one point of agreement: The Monday after Thanksgiving is emerging as a launch pad for online browsing, purchasing and promotions.
Shop.org, which credits itself with coining the phrase Cyber Monday following a sales spike last November, sees the day fast becoming one of the year’s biggest for online shopping. Three-quarters of e-tailers found their take “increased substantially” on Cyber Monday in 2005.
MasterCard, predicting a wave of procrastination and prudence this holiday, expects cyber shopping to peak a week later, beginning Monday, Dec. 4. Only 10 percent of the people MasterCard surveyed online in October said they planned to shop the Web on Monday.
“Clearly it’s a big day, but it’s not the biggest day — it’s about a kickoff for holiday shopping online,” said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, which for the first time has posted a Web site at cybermonday.com, aggregating links to about 400 merchants. “Online retailers had advance notice Cyber Monday is a new word in shoppers’ vocabulary and they’ve used that date as a launching platform for promotions.”
That said, people are likely to place their traditional bets on when they can get the best prices — and whether the things they want will still be available.
In 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the ninth-most active online shopping day among MasterCard holders, a company spokesman said. The busiest came one week later, on Monday, Dec. 5. Mondays and Tuesdays, from Thanksgiving through Christmas Eve, are generally the heaviest holiday purchasing times for MasterCard holders.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumers will have spent a projected $1.15 billion online, comScore forecast, up from $924 million over the four-day period last year. Fulgoni predicted the biggest spending day online this holiday would occur during the week of Dec. 11, possibly that Monday or Tuesday.