5 Digital Stats That Sum Up Cyber Monday and Black Friday

Today you can buy a 12-pack of coconut water for $18, down from the usual price of $28, on Amazon. Best Buy is promoting a 43-inch Toshiba TV for $200, priced $150 cheaper than the regular price. As consumers scour retailers’ websites and stores for the best holiday deals, here are five digital stats that stand out about how consumers are shopping.

1. Cyber Monday frenzy

Adobe is crunching data on ecommerce transactions, tracking 80 percent of online transactions for the 100 largest retailers. Per the firm, consumers spent $840 million through 10 a.m. Monday, equivalent to a 16.9 percent year-over-year growth.

Moreover, Adobe predicts that today will be the biggest U.S. online shopping day ever, with web traffic up 12 percent. In terms of mobile, smartphones and tablets make up 53.3 percent of traffic and 39.7 percent of revenue.

2. Early bird shopping

With more consumers shopping online, Walmart, Toys R Us and Target are a handful of retailers that started ramping up online deals before Thanksgiving to prepare for the flood of online shopping.

According to Adobe, consumers spent $15.12 billion on Saturday and Sunday, a 10.1 percent year-over-year growth. Search advertising drove 22.4 percent of sales from paid media while direct traffic made up 26.9 percent and email contributed to 19.7 percent of sales.

3. Small-screen shopping

Shoppers are increasingly moving from desktop to mobile (which includes smartphone and tablets) to not only research products but also shop.

According to Salesforce, mobile made up 64 percent of shopping visits this weekend, up from 54 percent last year. For sales, mobile made up 43 percent of orders, an 10 percent increase from 33 percent last year.

4. Message overload

Retailers are notorious for sending out massive numbers of emails and notifications around the holidays that promote time-sensitive deals and this year was no exception.

On Black Friday alone, retailers sent nearly three billion emails, more than 82 million SMS and push notifications and collected 8.8 billion data points, like email sign-ups.

5. Small retailers nail mobile

Surprisingly, it’s not big brands that are driving mobile conversions. According to Adobe, websites from small retailers that make $10 million or less convert twice as much as bigger retailers that make $100 million or more.

During Small Business Saturday, which encourages consumers to shop from local merchants, mobile traffic hit 56.7 percent of total web traffic, indicating that smaller retailers are providing easy-to-navigate and simple mobile sites.