NEW YORK — Americans clicked away for deals on Cyber Monday, which is expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history and the biggest online shopping day of the year for the third straight year.
According to research firm comScore, Americans are expected to spend $1.5 billion, up 20 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. That figure is only a fraction of the estimated $59.1 billion spent by shoppers during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend.
Early results show that online shopping was up 24.1 percent compared with the same time period a year ago, according to figures by IBM Benchmark released at noon.
Sales from mobile devices, which include tablets, rose 12percent. The group does not track dollar-amount sales.
The strong start to Cyber Monday, a term coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed people were doing a lot of shopping on their work computers on the Monday after Thanksgiving, comes after overall online sales rose during the four-day holiday shopping weekend that began on Thanksgiving.
“Online’s piece of the holiday pie is growing every day, and all the key dates are growing with it,” said Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “The Web is becoming a more significant part of the traditional brick and-mortar holiday shopping season.”
It’s the latest sign that Americans are moving to the convenience of the Web. With the growth in smart phones and tablet computers, shoppers can buy what they want, whenever they want, wherever they want. As a result, retailers have ramped up the deals they are offering on their websites during the Christmas shopping season, a time when stores can make up to 40 percent of their annual revenue.
Amazon.com, which started its Cyber Monday deals at 12:01 a.m. Monday, was offering as much as 60 percent off a Panasonic Viera 55-inch TV that’s usually priced higher than $1,000.
Sears was offering $430 off a Maytag washer and dryer, each on sale for $399. And Kmart was offering 75 percent off all of its diamond earrings and $60 off a 12-in-1 multigame table on sale for $89.99.
The level of online spending on Monday will offer insight into Americans’ evolving shopping habits during the Christmas season. With the growth of access to high speed Internet and the wide use of smart phones and tablets, people are relying less on their work computers to shop than they did when Shop.org, the digital division of trade group The National Retail Federation, introduced the term “Cyber Monday.”
As a result, the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday has become busy for online shopping as well. Online sales on Thanksgiving Day, traditionally not a popular day for online shopping, rose 32 percent over last year to $633 million, according to comScore.
And online sales on Black Friday were up 26 percent from the same day last year, to $1.042 billion. It was the first time online sales on Black Friday surpassed $1 billion.
Business, Pages 22 on 11/27/2012