Cyber Monday online sales increased 19 percent compared with last year, setting the foundation for what’s projected to be the biggest online shopping day of 2013.
Retailers catering to smartphone and tablet users are especially benefiting, with mobile traffic accounting for 30 percent of the total, an increase of almost 62 percent from last year, International Business Machines Corp. said.
The convenience of surfing deals from the couch is allowing online retailers to ramp up sales after the first spending decline on a Black Friday weekend since 2009. Mobile devices drove more than 16 percent of online sales, IBM said. EBay Inc.’s PayPal unit said in statement that mobile payment volume more than doubled as of 2 p.m. Monday.
“Cyber Monday has been the single biggest shopping day of the year for U.S. retailers for a number of years now,” Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said in a statement. “This year should be no different, especially given the compressed timeframe for holiday shopping and the trend toward more online shopping in general.”
Retailers such as Amazon. com Inc. are chasing e-commerce holiday revenue that is projected to increase 15 percent from 2012 to $78.7 billion, according to Forrester. Online spending increased 15 percent to a record $1.2 billion on Black Friday, according to research by ComScore Inc.
Amazon and eBay both posted an increase in same-store sales in early tracking Monday, compared with last year, according to ChannelAdvisor Inc, which provides services to sellers on those sites. Amazon comparable sales rose 47 percent and eBay’s increased 21 percent, the firm said.
EBay had said it expected Cyber Monday to be its biggest sales day this holiday season.
Commerce on tablets and smartphones grew twice as fast in the third quarter as desktop online spending, and Web users in August spent more time engaging with retailers on mobile devices than on desktops for the first time, according to ComScore.
Buying patterns on mobile devices since Thanksgiving have shown that tablets are more popular for purchases, though mobile phones are the choice for browsing. Smartphones drove 20 percent of all online traffic compared with 9.4 percent for tablets, IBM said. At the same time, tablets accounted for 10 percent of purchases, more than the 6.3 percent driven by phones.
The overall spending decline on the Black Friday weekend reinforced projections for a lackluster holiday, increasing chances retailers will extend the deep discounts already hurting their profit margins. Purchases at stores and websites fell 2.9 percent to $57.4 billion during the four days beginning with the Nov. 28 Thanksgiving holiday, according to a survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation.