Adobe Data Shows Record Breaking Holiday Weekend Shopping

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Adobe today released its 2016 online shopping data for Cyber Monday and the holiday weekend overall. Adobe’s Cyber Monday report is based on aggregated and anonymous data from 23 billion visits to retail websites.

Pet care product prices were among the highest discounts for holiday shopping, with a 12 percent discount, according to Adobe. Additionally, Thanksgiving Day discounts on pet care products were 10.9 percent higher than last year’s discounts. As of Sunday, the pet care category showed one of the largest price decreases of any product segment: -9.7 percent in 2016 versus +6.1 percent last year. On the other hand, pet care consumer spending increased 136 percent on Thanksgiving Day.

Cyber Monday is on track to hit a new record with $3.39 billion spent online, a 10.2 percent increase year-over-year (YoY). This will mark the largest online sales day in history, surpassing Black Friday ($3.34 billion) by a narrow margin. Cyber Monday is expected to generate slightly less mobile revenue than Black Friday at $1.19 billion, a 48 percent YoY increase. The holiday shopping season so far (November 1-28) is expected to drive a total of $39.9 billion in online revenue, a 7.4 percent increase YoY, with 27 out of 28 days this holiday season generating over $1 billion.

Mobile continues to drive the majority of visits to retail websites on Cyber Monday at 53 percent (44 percent coming from smartphones, 9 percent from tablets), while accounting for 35 percent of sales (25 percent smartphones, 10 percent tablets).

“Cyber Monday is on track to be the biggest online shopping day ever, surpassing our forecast by almost $27 million or 0.8 percent,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Insights. “This indicates that consumers still had more appetite for online shopping despite the incredible volume of online sales on Black Friday. Prices are expected to start climbing after today as retailers shift attention to extend the season late into December with quick shipping deals and the option to click and collect in store.”

Adobe measures 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers and uses its proven, predictive model powered by Adobe Sensei to calculate the remaining hours of the day. Seven dollars and fifty cents out of every 10 dollars spent online with the top 500 U.S. retailers goes through Adobe Marketing Cloud. The tremendous volume of data puts Adobe in the unique position to deliver highly accurate, census-based online sales totals, pricing and product availability trends, according to Business Wire.

Additional findings by Adobe regarding Cyber Monday included the following data:

Mobile performance: Conversions were higher over holiday averages, with smartphones at 1.9 percent, tablets at 3.7 percent and desktops at 4.3 percent (compared to holiday averages of 1.3, 2.9 and 3.2 percent, respectively). The average order value (AOV) on iOS smartphones ($139) was slightly higher compared to Android smartphones ($124).

Discounts: The highest price drops were seen for televisions (average discount of 21.5 percent), tablets (21.3 percent), toys (16.2 percent) and pet care (12 percent). Video game consoles have shown a slight increase in price since Thanksgiving and Black Friday (0.5 percent).

Top promotion drivers: Search ads (35.5 percent of sales) and direct sales (23.8 percent of sales) drove the majority of sales on Cyber Monday, but both are down compared to the holiday average (40 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Shopper Helper sites like CNET and RetailMeNot (18.5 percent of sales) grew by 15.6 percent and email (19.9 percent of sales) grew by 32.7 percent.

Thanksgiving weekend sales: November 24-27 brought in $9.36 billion, a 16.4 percent increase YoY. Black Friday set a new record by surpassing the three-billion-dollar mark for the first time at $3.34 billion (21.6 percent growth YoY). Thanksgiving Day online sales were just shy of the $2 billion at $1.93 billion, an 11.5 percent increase YoY. Saturday and Sunday brought in the remaining $4.1 billion combined, a 14.8 percent YoY increase.

Thanksgiving weekend mobile performance: Mobile accounted for 56 percent of visits (smartphones: 45 percent; tablets: 11 percent) and 37 percent of sales (smartphones: 25 percent; tablets: 12 percent) and totaled $3.46 billion in sales. Black Friday became the first day in retail history to drive over one billion dollars in mobile revenue at $1.2 billion, a 33 percent growth YoY.