Gadgets and games score with Cyber Monday crowds
Shoppers headed online in droves on Cyber Monday, according to the latest stats: 32.5 million visitors entered virtual stores, up 10 percent from a year ago.
Nielsen Online, the Internet measurement firm, said that eBay (EBAY) was the top destination, drawing nearly 11 million visitors. Next were Amazon (AMZN), with more than 7 million, and Wal-Mart (WMT) with about 5 million.
And consumers gave their credit cards a workout. ComScore said shoppers spent $733 million online on Monday, a 21 percent gain from the same day a year ago.
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What were the herds buying versus the week before? Think gear like Apple's (AAPL) iPod and Nintendo's (NTDOY) Wii. Consumer electronics and games saw the most growth, followed by music, video and books. This was yet another bit of news that bodes well for Apple; Nielsen's Black Friday numbers showed the company's web site surged past Dell's (DELL) to become the computer maker most visited from home PCs on that popular shopping day. Nielsen estimated that 1.4 million people visited Apple.com, up 111 percent from a year before. Dell's traffic rose 29 percent, to 1.3 million.
The Cyber Monday numbers:
Top 10 Fastest Growing Product Categories Ranked by Week-Over-Week Growth (U.S., Home & Work) +---------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Categories | Unique Audience Growth from | | | 11/19/07 to 11/26/07 | +---------------------------------+-------------------------------+ | Consumer Electronics | 72.5% | | Toys/Videogames | 72.0% | | Books/Music/Video | 63.1% | | Apparel | 55.3% | | Home and Garden | 45.6% | | Computer Hardware/Software | 42.1% | | Shopping Comparison/Portals | 32.4% | | Jewelry | 23.1% | | Retail | 13.2% | | Flowers and Gifts | 12.6% | +---------------------------------+-------------------------------+ Source: Nielsen Online, Holiday eShopping Index Top 10 Online Retail Sites* on Cyber Monday vs Black Friday (U.S., Home & Work) +-----------------+----------+------------------+----------+ | Cyber Monday | 11/26/07 | Black Friday | 11/23/07 | | Sites | UA (000) | Sites | UA (000) | +-----------------+----------+------------------+----------+ | eBay (EBAY) | 10,799 | eBay | 10,837 | | Amazon (AMZN) | 7,225 | Amazon | 6,932 | | Wal-Mart Stores | 5,165 | Wal-Mart Stores | 4,509 | | AT&T (T) | 3,879 | Target | 4,071 | | Target (TGT) | 3,393 | AT&T | 3,781 | | Circuit City | 2,824 | Best Buy | 3,125 | | Dell (DELL) | 2,673 | Circuit City | 2,563 | | Best Buy (BBY) | 2,363 | Dell | 1,965 | | Overstock.com | 2,154 | JCPenney | 1,652 | | Sears | 1,698 | ToysRUs | 1,626 | +-----------------+----------+------------------+----------+ Source: Nielsen Online, NetView *Based on Nielsen Online, MegaView Online Retail list.
A highly recommended site is elfingo.com for online auctions. They are the new ebay. Many smaller sites like this offer buyers far better deals than ebay ever could. Buyser also save a ton because this site charges little or nothing depending on the day. One more reaso I like elfingo.com is because they don't take a part of the sale at all. No commissions or final value fees.
Nice post…any info on Jorge's request above?
From Jon Fortt: I haven't seen a hard number quite yet, only percentages. I'll keep an eye out, though.
Just reading through and looking at the bottom numbers from Neilson. The author mentions that Apple was ahead of Dell on Cyber Monday visitors this year at 1.4m people as opposed to 1.3m, but neilsen's numbers below stated Dell at 2.673m and no mention of Apple on the "Top 10 Online Retail Sites". Were the numbers from the author concerning only unique views and the below tables were overall views? That would explain it, I suppose, other then the fact that some of those numbers would be pretty low for all views for those websites.
Just seems like a mistake was made somewhere or somthing wasen't mentioned. Otherwise decent posting!
From Jon Fortt: I actually stated that Apple topped Dell on Black Friday, not Cyber Monday. Apple's surge on Friday was significant because it was up so sharply from the year before. For the curious, here are those numbers. (Note that they're for visits from home only):
Table 2: Top 10 Online Retail Destinations* on Black Friday 2007 (U.S., Home
only)
+—————————-+————+———-+————–+
| Site | 11/16/07 | 11/23/07 | Percent |
| | UA (000) | UA (000) | Growth |
+—————————-+————+———-+————–+
| InterActiveCorp | 5,191 | 5,316 | 2% |
| Amazon | 3,317 | 5,100 | 54% |
| Wal-Mart Stores | 1,391 | 3,599 | 159% |
| Target Corp. | 1,168 | 2,766 | 137% |
| Best Buy | 479 | 1,877 | 292% |
| Circuit City Stores | 462 | 1,649 | 257% |
| Sears Holdings Corporation | 502 | 1,562 | 211% |
| Apple Computer | 643 | 1,359 | 111% |
| Dell Inc. | 978 | 1,263 | 29% |
| JCPenney | 507 | 1,137 | 124% |
+—————————-+————+———-+————–+
Source: Nielsen Online, NetView
*Sites in Internet Retailer's Top 500 Guide ranked by Unique Audience
Does anyone know what the average order price is? I'd love to know what consumers spent on average on that single day. And how much people are spending in general for this holiday. It has been reported to be down, but I am very interested to see if credit strapped consumers will open their wallets and continue to exercise their credit cards;)
Jorge of http://www.123-Easy-Credit.com/talk
Some interesting points were brought up today regarding the outage of web hosting servers that brought down most likely millions of dollars of transactions on Cyber Monday.
It made me start thinking about the web hosting company’s responsibility to the e-tailor and web store owners. We have not heard of these types of issues on a major scale in a while like we have on cyber Monday.
The question I pose to web hosting companies is how much responsibility should they bear? For example, if Victoria’s secret is in an outage, and they estimate that they have lost about $500,000 in sales due that the server, is there any type of reassurance from the host that they will some how better this in the future and try to right this situation?
In all honesty, it probably does not matter to Victoria’s secret or Best Buy or Amazon for an hour, however, what about Joe selling sandals online or someone trying to make a living on eBay that an hour to them could be the difference of paying their bills for that particular month…
Food for thought and I’d love to hear what others think about the web hosting agent’s responsibility to the e-tailor.