Commentary

Thanksgiving Day To Cyber Monday

Nothing says ‘tis the season’ like the five-day period spanning Thanksgiving Day to the following Monday, otherwise known as Cyber Monday. The CYBER 5 2018 Report, by the editors of Internet Retailer, provides benchmarks, results, and analysis of the Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday sales period in U.S. ecommerce, for online retailers.

Merchants spend months preparing for it, bulking up inventory levels, devising promotions, load-testing sites and more, while online shoppers scout deals and check gift-buying tasks off their lists from where ever they happen to be. The just-past Cyber 5 period brought with it an expected surge in online sales, with Thanksgiving leading in year-over-year growth at 28%, per Adobe Inc., which bases its analysis on transaction data collected from 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers.

But online sales have been growing strongly throughout the early part of the holiday season, of consumers anticipated completing at least 50% of their holiday shopping online this past season. From Nov. 1-26 (Cyber Monday), online sales totaled $58.52 billion, a 16.8% increase from $50.1 billion spent during the same period in 2017, according to an Internet Retailer/Bizrate Insights consumer survey fielded in November among more than 1,000 consumers. This year, the new benchmark for a banner day for daily online sales is $2 billion, a mark retailers achieved seven times in the first 26 days of November, including nearly $8 billion on Cyber Monday alone.

The five-day period spanning Thanksgiving to the Monday following (aka Cyber Monday) delivered a concentrated dose of those sales to online retailers. Internet Retailer estimates that U.S. shoppers spent $22.55 billion online during the Cyber 5 period, up 19.3% from $18.90 billion in 2017.

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