Cyber Monday 2011 broke new sales records, according to the research firm Comscore.
$1.25 billion was spent online yesterday, compared to $1.03 billion that was spent online during last year’s Cyber Monday. That’s an increase of 22%. It’s hard to imagine what this number would be if the economy was hot. Of course, if money were flowing easier, would us shoppers be as hungry for a good deal? Would stores even be offering such good deals? We’ll have to wait for the economy to pick up before we have an answer for that one.
But while we wait, let’s look at some more numbers from an online retail benchmark study conducted by IBM. According to their study, we ordered more products online this Cyber Monday that last year’s. From an average last year of 6.4 items per order to 7.3 this year. The average value of the entire order didn’t change much though – from $195 dollars last year to $198 this year. A reflection of better deals this year, or are we just buying cheaper items?
IBM’s study also tracks the ‘shopping card abandonment rate’. It’s high, averaging about 63% over the last two years. This is pretty standard, though some studies have suggested it’s even higher throughout much of the year. While some ecommerce pros struggle with the reason why that number is so high, we shoppers can tell them. Sites that require the shopper to ‘put the item in the cart to get the price’ or won’t quote a shipping rate until it’s put in the cart lead us to abandon the cart after we use it to get a price. Heh – we imagine that the shopping cart abandonment rate would be just as high at brick-and-mortar stores if we had to put stuff in the cart to get the price. Picture 63% of shopping carts being abandoned at the check out line of your local grocery store!
Quite a big deal is being made of the number of orders being placed from mobile devices this year – from smart phones, tablets and such. This year, 6.6% of online orders were placed via mobile devices, and 193% increase from last year. But this is not so surprising considering the explosion of smartphones and tablets that have made it into the hands of consumers this year. Sites across the internet and seeing a surge of traffic from mobile devices.
Of some surprise was the small amount of shopping traffic referred from social sites. According to IBM, just 0.8% of shopping traffic was referred from Facebook this Cyber Monday, up just slightly from last years 0.73%. Twitter referred even less, just 0.02%… and that’s way down from last year’s 0.07%.
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