Mentora note:  Here’s hoping that your e-business site was lifted by the rising tide that Cyber Monday created.  Our customers’ sites were easily able to handle the 11:25 am peak and tell us that sales continue to be strong as customers return to their sites.  That’s what positive experience does.    

Black Friday gets most of the hype, but 2012 data show that Cyber Monday out-paced Black Friday sales by more than 30% in 2012.   According to a report issued by IBM, online sales were up more than 36 percent over Black Friday and represented the biggest online shopping day ever.

• Consumer Spending Increases: Online sales increased 30.3 percent over 2011.
• Shopping Peaked at 11:25am.
• Mobile Shopping and Mobile Traffic Increase: On Cyber Monday more than 18 percent of consumers used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, an increase of more than 70 percent over 2011.  Mobile sales reached close to 13 percent, an increase of more than 96 percent over 2011.

It was also noted that shoppers were actively utilizing a multitude of methods to optimize their decision-making.  Shoppers in retail locations were using mobile devices in real time to compare prices online to get the best deals.

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Retailers have successfully extended the holiday shopping season from weeks to months, with stores decorated earlier than ever and catalogs and television ads hinting at holiday gift-giving as early as late November.  What does this mean? In brief, the creep of Christmas and Hanukkah shopping is officially in full swing and chances that deal-seeking shoppers will be contained to one weekend in late November is likely a thing of the past. Welcome to etailers’ new reality; a season of holiday shopping where consumers seek out Black Friday savings every day.

And it means that if you’re still not sure about your website’s performance, now is a great time to call Mentora.

For decades, retailers promoted post-Turkey, barn-burner, blow-out deals to kick-start the holiday shopping season to commence on “Black Friday.”  Not anymore.   Many consumers have already started to expand their time horizon for deal hunting prior to the holidays. A recent poll from RetailMeNot showed that nearly 40% of parents with children under the age of 18 are beginning their holiday shopping before November. In fact, in 2012 nearly half of women surveyed (46% vs. 31% of men surveyed) start their holiday shopping earlier than November.

Some other facts from the same survey:

• 23% of respondents start shopping in early November
• 12% wait to start shopping until Black Friday/Cyber Monday
• Only 15% wait until after Cyber Monday to begin shopping
• Nearly 1 in 3 (32%), said they are done with their holiday shopping by the end of Cyber Monday!

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