From C Net
This year’s Cyber Monday online sales rose over sales from 2013, but the exact increase depends on who you ask.
Walmart advertises Cyber Monday sales on the company’s website. (Photo Illustration by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Online sales for the day were up by 8.5 percent over last year’s Cyber Monday, according to IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark. Mobile sales snagged 22 percent of all online sales, a 27.6 percent jump over last year.
The average online buyer spent $124.21, down 3.5 percent year over year, IBM said. Shoppers bought an average of 4.1 items per order, up 3 percent from last year.
Cyber Monday is a term cooked up by marketers several years ago to convince shoppers to surf the Web the first Monday after Thanksgiving to pick up the latest holiday bargains. Retailers count on holiday shoppers to ring in a healthy portion of overall sales for the year. As such, many online vendors offer huge sales, savings and other discounts to get consumers to spend Monday shopping online.
An 8.1 percent rise in online sales doesn’t sound too bad, but it failed to meet expectations. IBM blamed the shortfall on retailers offering online deals weeks in advance, prompting consumers to begin their holiday shopping earlier than usual.
“Consumers are not holding back their purchases for deals on certain days anymore and that trend is becoming increasingly clear,” Jay Henderson, strategy program director at IBM, told Reuters.
But wait, a different report says that Cyber Monday sales actually soared by 16 percent from 2013. The 2014 Digital Index Online Shopping report from Adobe pegged online sales for the day at $2.65 billion, a healthy increase over last year.
The top 25 retailers, each of whom snagged $30 million or more on Cyber Monday, boosted online sales by 25 percent for a total of almost $1.8 billion. Smaller retailers who grabbed $2 million or less in sales, saw their take grow by just 5 percent from last year. The biggest discounts popped up in the morning, while 54 percent of holiday spending came outside normal working hours, Adobe said.
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