The numbers are in, and it looks like the ghost of Christmas 2009’s online shopping future will be a somewhat jolly soul—or maybe not at least as grim as feared.
Stats released by several organizations yesterday show shopping levels for this year’s Cyber Monday topping 2008 levels.
Coremetrics reported that sales on Monday, Nov 30 2009 were up 13.7% compared to Cyber Monday 2008, with the average dollar amount spent by consumers up 38.2% ($180.03 versus $130.24).
Apparel retailers and jewelry retailers led the way, reporting the biggest average sale increases, while sports apparel and gear retailers showed a nearly 55% increase in the number of new consumers visiting their sites. Department store sites showed a 33% increase in new visitors. However, those retailers’ average orders were down nearly 10%.
“We expect to see one more spike in online spending when the final ‘free-shipping-is-ending’ promotions are announced,” said John Squire, chief strategy officer of Coremetrics, in a statement. “Until then, retailers will watch consumer behavior very carefully to gauge what’s working well and what they need to adjust.”
One interesting bit of consumer behavior this year was a tendency to wait until getting home from work to shop on Cyber Monday, rather than doing so from their desks, noted Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org, in a release.
“Since retailers began highlighting Cyber Monday promotions five years ago, Americans’ spending patterns have changed,” he said. “More families have high speed Internet access at home and don’t need to rely on their work computers to make holiday purchases, which makes the early morning and evening hours crucial for retail sales.”
Card fraud prevention and payment processing firm Retail Decisions estimated that U.S. online retail spending hit $2.2 billion on Monday, up 35% from last year. This trails their estimates for Black Friday’s online sales of $3.1 billion, up 52% over 2008.
What were the hot items this year? Retail Decisions list of most popular products showed no surprises: The list included the Tom Tom GPS; the Nintendo Wii; Kodak, Sony and Samsung digital cameras; Playstation 3; and the “Ice Age 3” DVD.
Big sellers for shopping channel QVC included a Dell Windows 7 Notebook, with 60,000 units ordered, and a Keurig Premium Single Serve Coffee Brewer, with nearly 100,000 sold.
On Monday, QVC.com had its highest traffic day in its history, attracting more than 1 million unique visitors. This broke last year’s Cyber Monday record of more than 842,000 visitors to the 13-year-old site. QVC.com also set a record for number unique visitors in a week, 3.5 million from Nov. 23-30, a 26% increase over the same period last year.
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