Cyber Monday appears on track to becoming the biggest online shopping day ever, and web traffic isn’t expected to peak for another several hours.
ChannelAdvisor, a global provider of ecommerce services that is based in Morrisville, notes in a Monday afternoon update:
- Amazon is “on pace to match last year’s 52 percent increase”
- eBay is up 5 times compared to last year – “a definite change in what we’ve seen historically.”
- “Taking that datapoint with the other Cyber Five results we’ve seen and eBay is definitely participating in holiday 2012 in a much different and larger way than last year.”
- “Comparison shopping engines was slightly down year to year, probably driven by the Google product search/Google Shopping change.”
- Search was up 30.6 percent, ”another strong showing.”
Meanwhile, IBM Benchmark says, as of noon Eastern time, sales were up more than 24 percent compared with last year.
And ComScore says nearly $14 billion already has been spent online this holiday season, a 16 percent increase.
Analysts say the online sales are growing as shoppers become comfortable with, if not hooked on the convenience of the Web and the deals to be found. Adding to the boom are sales from smartphones and tablet computers.
The National Retail Federation coined the term “Cyber Monday” in 2005 as data showed people were doing a lot of shopping on their work computers on the Monday following Thanksgiving. But it now looks like the advances in technology could allow companies to reclaim some of that lost productivity. The group’s digital division Shop.org says people are relying less on work computers to shop with the growth in high speed Internet access and the popularity of mobile devices.
[CHANNELADVISOR ARCHIVE: Check out a decade of ChannelAdvisor stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]
(The AP contributed to this report.)
