Cyber Monday, until last year the often over-hyped alter-ego of Black Friday, has not only broken over one billion dollars for the second year in a row, but has seen last year's billion and raised some. There was a time when the busiest online shopping day of the year was generally sometime closer to Christmas, when people were getting last-minute gift-shopping done. But now the race is on hours after Thanksgiving, in both the bricks-and-mortar and virtual worlds.
Early figures from yesterday's sales had spending up about 22 percent from last year, with total revenues coming in at around $1.25 billion, up from 1.03 on the same Monday in 2010, according to Comscore, which certified this year's Cyber Monday as the "heaviest U.S. online spending day in history."
The term "Cyber Monday" was coined in 2005 as a way to try and foster online shopping, with its creators assigning their shopping extravaganza to a Monday assuming — in the days before broadband was widely adopted and dial-up was still the norm — that people would have better internet connection while at work. Last year, research out of Purdue University found that companies could lose a combined $1 billion in productivity from staff scanning this year's sales. It was started as a way to stimulate e-commerce, but is now the biggest day for online shopping all year.
This year employers were armed and ready, looking to crack down on workplace online shopping by restricting access to online retailers. In a studyconducted by Robert Half Technology, more than 1,400 CIOs of companies of over 100 employees were surveyed — 60 percent of which said they would block all access to online shopping sites this year, up from 48 percent last year.
So, then, why the big jump? It could be because of people like the more than 20 percent of the CIOs questioned who said they would allow access to online shopping. But it also more than likely has to do with the much higher availability of smartphones and tablets that allow people to surf the web without using their work PC.
Paypal reported that by Monday afternoon, payments made on mobile devices increased by a staggering 514 percent. John Squire, chief strategy officer of IBM's Smarter Commerce said that this figure is in-line with what many merchants saw yesterday. By mid-afternoon, 7.5 percent of sales came from mobile devices, 2.7 percent of these purchases from iPads, a 250 percent jump from last year.
Analysts say that this increase, while promising, doesn't necessarily mean that the enthusiastic shopping seen yesterday will keep going through the holidays. It is also too early to judge whether this is even a positive sign for the economy. The massive amount of discounted goods may mean that people wanted to take advantage of the sales, not that they have money to spend.
Sucharita Mulpuru, e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research told the New York Times that “a happy Web season doesn’t mean the economy is improving, just that people are becoming more mature from a technology standpoint and more savvy about finding good deals.”
Still, some pretty crazy jumps happened this season. Mercent Corp., a company that helps 200 national retailers like Office Depot Inc. sell products online, saw sales rise 37% on Monday morning.
Analysts are predicting that online sales will increase 15 percent this holiday season (it's up to $15 billion so far), and are expecting offline shopping to do less than three percent better than last year. According to comScore, even on regular old Black Friday, people spent $816 million online, a 26 percent increase from last year.
A wireless company even paid to make #CyberMonday a sponsored tweet. With a trending hashtag and what seems like every major retailer on-board, the day to help the spur e-commerce has taken on an entirely new life, and its new-found ubiquity and increased sales are giving Cyber Monday a lasting place in America's favorite pre-holiday commercial tradition.
