Over the last few years, the 5-day period from Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday have become known among the digital marketing and e-commerce communities as the “Cyber 5”. The Cyber 5 contains what is generally 3 of the biggest shopping days of the year. This year, the Cyber 5 was a unique holiday shopping period compared to the last few years. Amazon, Walmart, and other online retailers in the Top 10 of the Internet 1000 spent a vast amount of campaign dollars in a shorter period this year driving traffic.

Why? Well, incase you didn’t notice, the calendar was a bit different this year. Thanksgiving was late, which means this year there are 6 fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Traffic driving flights of media were compressed, buyers still waited until Black Friday to really kick into gear, and consumers obliged with a very healthy holiday shopping period – most e-commerce news sources are reporting anywhere from 12%-18% increase in top line sales compared to last year.

Here are some snippets from key news sources that we follow and links to the details:

First, initial results from Commerce 360 reported records for Fanatics, Lulus, and others brands cited – record mobile share with large increase very noteworthy. These popular brands that hit the sweet spots of many demographics are a great bell weather for all consumer shopping segments. It’s interesting to note how Fanatics set records with mobile purchasing:

How online retailers fared during Cyber 5

To Discount or Not to Discount During Cyber 5?

Digital Commerce 360 also reported that nearly a third of Top 1000 DNVBs did not offer discounts on Cyber Monday. Instead, they promoted their everyday prices as year-round deals.

The Numbers on Cyber 5, 2019

Online sales reached $490 million on Black Friday morning, with mobile generating 57% of visits and a hearty 40% chunk of sales, according to Adobe Digital Insights. As anyone with their finger on the pulse in e-commerce knows, mobile site usage and conversion has gone over the 50% mark across all B2C segments and in many industries that are B2B as well.

Thanksgiving Day online sales totaled $1.93 billion, showing growth of 11.5%, Adobe reported. Mobile sales alone reached $449 million between midnight and 5 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, a 58% year-over-year leap.

Total online sales for the month of November surged to $29.09 billion by Black Friday morning, showing 4.7% online sales growth for the period, Adobe adds. Online sales exceeded $1 billion on 23 of 24 days this month.

SalesForce Chimes in with What They Saw

Accoring to SalesForce, Black Friday is on track to be the digital shopping day of the year.

Shoppers lived up to early expectations this Black Friday as U.S. digital revenue hit record highs. Brands and retailers pulled in $7.2B in digital revenue on Friday, netting a 14% growth over last year.

Merchants Just Extend the Sales for Black Friday / Cyber Monday

More than 60% of top merchants have extended the popular web shopping day beyond 24 hours, a Digital Commerce 360 analysis finds.

What Did Search Engines Take?

Advertisers spent 32% more on Google Shopping ads and 50% more on Amazon Sponsored Products Ads between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday this year than last, according to an analysis of Tinuiti retail clients put together by the agency.

What Did Big Commerce Have To Say About Cyber 5, 2019?

Big Commerce is one of the largest SAAS e-commerce platforms and here’s what it reported:

Thanksgiving and the Sunday prior to Cyber Monday both saw the highest YoY GMV increase at 26%. GMV increase from Thanksgiving 2017 to Thanksgiving 2018 was 14%, and Sunday in those same years saw an 8% increase.
Cyber Monday doubled in YoY GMV increase from 6.3% to 13%, and had the highest AOV at $122.20. Cyber Monday growth paled in comparison to Black Friday: YoY GMV increased from 16% to 23%, average order size rose from $109.60 to $119.60, and had the largest volume of orders with 313k.

Webstores continue to have the highest AOV of all sales channels, followed by Facebook, though Facebook’s AOV is significantly lower than branded websites. Amazon’s AOV is almost double that of eBay. Fashion & Jewelry brands saw a drop in traffic from Facebook, from 70% of GMV coming from the channel in 2018 down to 49% in 2019. Home & Garden took 16% and all others fell below 3%.

The Bottom Line

E-commerce sales continue to increase as a share of all retail and as a channel significantly. We believe that the compressed shopping calendar contributed to the health of some of these statistics this year but overall the direction of growth is as expected especially with an economy that overall remains very strong.

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