There were more Americans who shopped online than those who patiently waited in line in stores last Black Friday. E-commerce thrives the most during this season. Based on a recent survey, an even bigger turn out is expected on Cyber Monday.
According to the National Retail Federation, 44 percent went online during the Thanksgiving-Black Friday weekend compared to the 40 percent who shopped in-store. That amounts to 108.5 million and 99.1 million people, respectively. Black Friday turned out to be the busiest day with 74 percent of those who shopped online and 75 of those in-store. Saturday came next with 49 percent online and 40 percent in-store. Thanksgiving only had 36 percent of those who shopped online and 35 percent in-store. Sunday is the least popular day with only 34 percent online and 17 percent in-store.
The survey of the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics revealed that more than half of smartphone and tablet owners have relied on their devices with regards to helping them with shopping activities. Fortune reported that 60 percent of Walmart's Black Friday sales event orders place on their website came from mobile devices.
The flock of online shoppers is not yet finished as Cyber Monday hits. It is expected that around 122 million Americans will go online and purchase products. It's a million higher than that of last year. According to the Fortune, the dominance of e-commerce is evident as Adobe shared that such sales between Thanksgiving and Saturday had risen from 17.3 percent to top $7.2 billion. Furthermore, 28 million the consumers plan to shop on Cyber Monday through their phone. Apparently, this move has been seen by Walmart, J.C. Penney and Kohl's. This is why they have already invested on their mobile shopping apps.
Perhaps the one leading in e-commerce for quite some time is Amazon. The popular online shopping store is offering a whopping 75,000 deals. It's about time for other retailers to realize the shift consumers have made over the past years. Establishing the online presence of these "brick-and-mortar" stores is a way to capitalize on the increasing demand in e-commerce.
This demand in e-commerce is even more obvious when online stores gets "an extraordinary amount of traffic". This may cause for the site to crash. This will not be good for them. According to security firm Upguard, even just "ten minutes of downtime could translate to a loss of over $2 million in sales". Amazon would have been sure that its site could handle such traffic once Monday hits. On the other hand, Fortune reports that Target has offered discounts on Sunday and in-stores. The move might be to lessen the traffic on their website.
