RWRetailWire
Back to Discussions
DISCUSSION

Do the 2015 holidays point to a bigger future for e-commerce?

Written by George Anderson

It may be true that online shopping will never replace stores, but for the first several days of the 2015 holiday shopping season the retailing world got a glimpse of what it would be like if it did.

According to various reports, it appears as though Cyber Monday may very well have become the biggest day ever for e-commerce sales coming on the heels of Thanksgiving and Black Friday where more people, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), shopped online than visited stores.

NRF's Cyber Monday Expectations Survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics over the weekend predicted that nearly half of shoppers (121 million) planned to go online yesterday to buy something. While the number was down from 126.9 million in 2014, it followed the Thanksgiving weekend during which 103 million people shopped online.

Adobe predicted that online sales would reach nearly $3 billion yesterday, a 12 percent increase over Cyber Monday 2014. Both Adobe and NRF predicted significant growth in sales being made through smartphones and tablets. Walmart, via USA Today, reported that 70 percent of its online traffic came through mobile devices.

Cyber Monday deals
Sources: Banana Republic, Sears, MyHabit, Amazon, Staples

Traffic was so heavy at Target.com that the site put shoppers in a holding queue between 9:00 a.m. and 10:30 yesterday morning. The company had issues with orders through its mobile apps into the afternoon.

According to a Star Tribune report, traffic to Target's site at noon yesterday was twice as high as at any other previous time as consumers were drawn to 15 percent across the board discounts and free shipping and returns on all orders.

Discussion Thread0