Cyber Monday Stays Strong

On Monday we predicted that Black Friday might end up being a bigger day for online shopping than Cyber Monday for our sample population of over 10,000 active shoppers using the Alot Rewards app and other BargainMatch powered apps.

We were wrong.

While traffic in the early morning on Black Friday was significantly higher than on Cyber Monday, Monday traffic surged as folks got into work and exploded as they got home and raced to get last second deals.

Top Stores

The top five merchants we measure (we don’t currently include eBay and Amazon) were the same on both days.  None of the top stores was online only and all but Apple saw increases from Friday to Monday.  Apple pulled out all the stops on Friday, offering deals on products like the iPad that were only available that day. Their Black Friday sales were reportedly off the charts, blowing through their forecasts by 7 pm, so we probably shouldn’t feel too bad for them.

The Big Winners

Not surprisingly, several of the biggest gainers on Cyber Monday were online only stores like Overstock, Dell and QVC.  We were tickled that Victoria’s Secret saw a surge in traffic once people got back to work…imagine that!

On a hunch, we looked at Victoria's Secret activity on Tuesday, the night of their big fashion show. We noticed a bulge of traffic around the time of the program, as well as a little late night activity that we can't quite account for (though admittedly the data sample is too small for this to mean anything, we couldn't resist sharing):

The Big Losers

This batch was perhaps the most surprising to us. Tiger Direct and Newegg are very popular (mostly) online retailers so we would have expected them to increase not decrease.  Both did run very aggressive campaigns for Black Friday, but the tie that binds the bottom five (of the top 25 merchants we monitor) seems to be the dude factor..gadgets, hardware, electronics and games.  If you have a better explanation for it, we’d love to hear it. 

So, although we might have been too excited suggeting that Black Friday would overtake Cyber Monday, it is amazing to see how consumers are flocking to the online stores earlier and earlier, during typical Thanksgiving day activities. Will be interesting to see what the numbers tell us next year...

Interesting findings on your end around Black Friday and Cyber Monday trends? Let us know about them!