'Cyber Monday' Sets New Single-Day Online Shopping Record

Research firm comScore Inc. reported online retail sales of $733 million on Monday, marking it the largest single-day of online shopping ever recorded (press release - click chart to enlarge). The Monday after 'Black Friday' is often called 'Cyber Monday' as it represents the first big online sales surge with employees returning to work from the Thanksgiving holiday and using their computers to shop. Monday's sales total marked a 21% gain over the previous year, and an 84% surge in average daily online spending over the previous four-week period. Monday was also impressive in other ways: the number of total buyers rose 38%; 44% of total internet users made an online purchase; and 60% of the dollars spent online came from work computers. Volume was so heavy that Yahoo's shopping site crashed (full story). On a negative note, the average total spent per buyer declined 12%, possibly the result of consumers tightening their purse strings this holiday season amid the worst housing slump in at least two decades and fears of a recession. The decline in spending per buyer mirrored the increased volume but decreased spending on Black Friday (full summary). According to comScore, the top 10 e-tailers by sales volume were (in order): Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Target, Dell, Best Buy, Yahoo, Apple, Overstock.com, Circuit City and Microsoft's MSN Shopping.

Sources: Press release, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, AP, MarketWatch
Commentary: Yahoo Shopping Crashes On Cyber Monday • Traffic Up, Spending Down Over Black Friday Weekend
Stocks to watch: AMZN, WMT, TGT, DELL, BBY, YHOO, XRT, AAPL, OSTK, CC, MSFT. ETFs: XRT, RTH

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Comments

[Frank Li]

Any idea why the Apple numbers are so weak?