Shoppers snap up Cyber Monday deals

Robert Dray­ton uses his smart­phone to help find the right gifts and com­pare prices at Toys R Us in New York Mon­day. Shop­pers seem to be just as enthu­si­as­tic about shop­ping on their com­put­ers and smart­phones on Cyber Mon­day as they were about find­ing deals over the Black Fri­day week­end. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Seth Wenig)

MAE ANDERSON

AP Retail Writer

NEW YORK — Shop­pers seem to be just as enthu­si­as­tic about shop­ping on their com­put­ers and smart­phones on Cyber Mon­day as they were about find­ing deals over the weekend.

Online sales on Cyber Mon­day, which was started in 2005 by a retail trade group to encour­age Amer­i­cans to shop online on the Mon­day after Thanks­giv­ing, were up mid-afternoon by 15 per­cent from a year ago, accord­ing to data from IBM Bench­mark. Mean­while, sales from mobile devices were up 7.4 per­cent. The group did not give dol­lar amounts.

The Cyber Mon­day num­bers point to Amer­i­cans’ grow­ing com­fort with using their per­sonal com­put­ers, tablets and smart­phones to shop. Over the past few years, big chains like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, have been offer­ing more and bet­ter incen­tives like hourly deals and free ship­ping, to cap­i­tal­ize on that trend. It’s impor­tant for retail­ers to make a good show­ing dur­ing the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son, a time when they can make up to 40 per­cent of their annual revenue.

On Mon­day, Amazon.com offered its big­ger, more expen­sive Kin­dle DX for $259, or $120 off the reg­u­lar price. The Express cloth­ing chain was giv­ing 30 per­cent off and free ship­ping on all online orders. And Wal-Mart, which has been call­ing the hol­i­day “Cyber Week” in ads, was offer­ing an LG 47-inch LED TV for $879, or $320 off the reg­u­lar price.

“Cyber Mon­day is far more excit­ing to me than Black Fri­day,” says Jamie Minoso, a 40-year-old Eng­lish teacher from Alabama. “I do not enjoy the traf­fic and chaos involved in shop­ping at a mall.”

To be sure, the strong start to Cyber Mon­day, cre­ated by a unit of The National Retail Fed­er­a­tion, fol­lows an even stronger kick­off to the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son over the week­end. Amer­i­cans shopped in record num­bers, dri­ven by ear­lier store open­ings and a push by retail­ers for online sales.

A record 226 mil­lion shop­pers vis­ited stores and web­sites dur­ing the four-day hol­i­day week­end start­ing on Thanks­giv­ing Day, up from 212 mil­lion last year, accord­ing to the NRF. And sales on Black Fri­day, the day after Thanks­giv­ing, rose 7 per­cent to $11.4 bil­lion, the largest amount ever spent, accord­ing to Shop­per­Trak, which gath­ers stores’ data.

Online sales were strong even over the week­end. Thirty-eight per­cent of all pur­chases were made online this year, up from 31 per­cent to 32 per­cent last year, says Sherif Mityas, part­ner in the retail prac­tice of A.T. Kear­ney, who believes the increase was due to heavy promotions.

Bar­neys, for instance, offered 40 per­cent off on its web­site on Thanks­giv­ing Day, a day before it began its sales in stores. And Barnes & Noble offered 40 per­cent to 75 per­cent off online prod­ucts, dis­counts that weren’t avail­able in store.

“Retail­ers are doing a good job of cre­at­ing more excite­ment online in ways they can’t do in store,” Mityas says. “They’re cre­at­ing that excite­ment of, ‘I’ve got to get that spe­cial deal,” that is really spurring traffic.’”

It won’t be clear how well retail­ers will ulti­mately fare on Cyber Mon­day until Tues­day. But last year, sales on the day topped $1 bil­lion for the first time, mak­ing it the heav­i­est day of online spend­ing ever.

Ahead of this week’s “Cyber Mon­day,” the NRF says nearly 80 per­cent of retail­ers plan to offer spe­cial pro­mo­tions. And a record 122.9 mil­lion of Amer­i­cans are expected to shop on the day, up from 106.9 mil­lion who shopped on “Cyber Mon­day” last year, accord­ing to a sur­vey con­ducted for Shop.org.

By early after­noon on Mon­day, traf­fic was up about 37 per­cent year-over-year, accord­ing to Aka­mai, an online con­tent deliv­ery com­pany. Aka­mai says it expects online traf­fic to peak at about 9 p.m.

Traf­fic has been up sub­stan­tially since the Mon­day before Thanks­giv­ing as retail­ers pro­moted online deals ear­lier than ever, says Lelah Manz, Akamai’s chief strate­gist of commerce.

“There has been a huge vol­ume of pro­mo­tional activ­ity being dri­ven by daily deal sites, Face­book and other social net­work­ing sites,” she says.

Posted by AP News on Nov 28 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.