Cyber Monday sales rise 17% to more than $2B

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Online shoppers set a single-day spending record on Cyber Monday, despite deals being stretched out this holiday season.

Online sales Monday jumped 17 percent from last year, totaling nearly $2.04 billion, research firm comScore Inc. said Tuesday. That represents the heaviest online spending day in history and the first to surpass $2 billion in sales, said the firm, which tracks online sales.

Retailers from Target to Amazon have been offering online deals since the beginning of November, and are promising “cyber” deals all week.

Some anticipated the extended period would hurt Cyber Monday sales. And the lackluster start to the holiday shopping season in brick-and-mortar stores also lowered expectations. But shoppers appeared to be eager to go online.

The weekend after Thanksgiving also was popular for online shopping, with sales up 26 percent compared with the same weekend last year. The two-day period raked in $2.01 billion in online sales, according to comScore.

“Any notion that Cyber Monday is declining in importance is really unfounded, as it continues to post new historical highs and reflects the ongoing strength of online this holiday season,” comScore Chairman Emeritus Gian Fulgoni said.

This may be part of a larger shift toward online buying as mobile phones spur the practice known as “showrooming,” Fulgoni said in a statement. The term describes the practice of a consumer going into stores to see an item but then buying it, or a similar product, online.

Other organizations measured a more muted response for the day: IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that online sales rose 8.5 percent this year compared with last on Cyber Monday. That is less-stellar growth than last year’s, when IBM says online sales jumped more than 20 percent by its measure.

Cyber Monday is the busiest U.S. online shopping day of the year — a title it has held since 2010.

The name Cyber Monday was coined in 2005 by the National Retail Federation’s online arm, called Shop.org, to encourage people to shop online. The name was also a nod to online shopping being done at work where faster connections made it easier to browse.