Shoppers broke records on Monday when they busied themselves with online visits to retailers and spent more than a $1 billion.
That brought retail sales on Cyber Monday to $1.25 billion, a 22-percent increase compared to last year. That's the highest total for a Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving—and only the second time Cyber Monday sales have surpassed the $1 billion mark. Last year, totals reached $1.03 billion, according to researcher comScore.
Gian Fulgoni, comScore's chairman, describes Monday as an "historic" day.
"It was just the second billion-dollar spending day on record, following on the heels of Cyber Monday 2010," he explains. "While last year saw Cyber Monday rank as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the first time ever, it will be interesting to watch the next couple of weeks to see if any future individual days in 2011 manage to leapfrog this year's highest day to date."
The increase in sales is likely linked to the fact that more people shopped online on Monday, as an estimated 10 million consumers browsed and bought online, comScore notes. That's an 11-percent increase compared to last year's Cyber Monday. Consumers made an average of 1.9 purchases and spent an average of $125, or 9 percent more than they did in 2010.
About 43 percent of buyers made their purchases from home. However, the majority—more than 50 percent—shopped while they were at work, according to comScore.
Seven percent more shoppers than last year used mobile devices to access retail sites on Monday. And 6.6 percent of consumers used mobile devices to make a transaction, a 4.3-percent increase, according to a study by IBM Benchmark.
Auctiva staff writers constantly monitor trends and best practices of those selling on eBay and elsewhere online. They attend relevant training seminars and trade shows and regularly discuss the market with PowerSellers and other market experts.
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