Report: Amazon wins Cyber Monday sales crown, but falls shy of Prime Day totals

Dive Brief:

Amazon once again ranked as the most visited online retail property on Cyber Monday, followed by eBay, Wal-Mart, Kohl's and Target, according to research from comScore.
U.S. shoppers have spent $29.7 billion online over the holiday season to date, a 12% increase over the same period last year, comScore notes. Cyber Monday alone generated $2.67 billion in desktop online spending, up 17% over last year — the heaviest online spending day in history, and only the second day ever to surpass $2 billion in desktop sales. (Cyber Monday 2015 was the first.)
Some 130 million Americans visited online retail sites on Cyber Monday alone using a desktop computer, smartphone or tablet, representing just over half of the total digital population, comScore adds.

Dive Insight:

The weekend after Thanksgiving marked the second straight year when both Saturday and Sunday posted billion-dollar online shopping days, yielding a combined $2.5 billion in e-commerce sales, a 15% increase over last year, according to comScore. For the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, online buying from desktop computers totaled $8.41 billion, up 17% from last year.

Amazon accounted for 30.9% of total revenue generated from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, according to research from Slice Intelligence. "Though Amazon owned Cyber Monday, it wasn’t even the retailer’s biggest day this year," Slice stated. "Amazon shoppers spent 7% more on Prime Day 2016 than Cyber Monday, proving the company’s self-made holiday was a major success."

Nearly 7% of cyber weekend sales went to Best Buy, up from 6% in the same period last year. Apple also made gains with its Black Friday sale and was the eighth largest retailer over the period. Wal-Mart and Macy’s each saw their share drop slightly over Cyber Weekend compared to last year, Slice found.

Many emerging e-commerce players gained steam over the holiday weekend, according to research from SimilarWeb emailed to Retail Dive. Among SimilarWeb’s top 30 ranked shopping websites, Jet saw a traffic increase of 320% on Black Friday and 190% on Cyber Monday when compared with their traffic from last year. Similarly, Wish experienced an increase of 155% on Black Friday and 101% on Cyber Monday. Last but not least, Wayfair's traffic jumped 63% on Black Friday and 80% on Cyber Monday when compared with traffic stats from last year. Mobile certainly played a role in these increases, according to SimilarWeb, but Jet's incredible growth could be partially attributed to its new connection with Wal-Mart, which bought the digital upstart earlier this year for $3.3 billion.

The majority of the increase in e-commerce orders came from smartphones, based on analysis of more than 5 million orders from 110 national retailer partners conducted by digital order platform Shoprunner and emailed to Retail Dive. Shoprunner found that mobile phone sales increased 10 times over the last four years, while sales from tablets remained relatively stable.

While toys and electronics remain among the largest gift categories, health and beauty saw the largest increase in online orders (982%) over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, followed by automotive (785%), Shoprunner also found. The most popular shopping categories on Black Friday were electronics, with a 1236% increase in orders over a regular shopping day, followed by health & beauty (a 908% increase) and books, movies and music (an 856% increase).

Shoprunner also found that millennial men and residents of smaller cities were among the demographic groups that notably boosted their number of online orders, with men between the ages of 35 and 54 increasing orders by 337%, men under 35 boosting orders 471%, women aged 35 to 54 hiking theirs 383% and women under 35 increasing theirs 321%. Meanwhile, residents of New Castle, DE increased their orders by 742% to win the weekend, while those living in Jersey City, NJ and Charlotte, NC grew theirs by 701%.

The surges in online spending bode well for the remaining days of the holiday season, according to comScore CEO Gian Fulgoni.

"Cyber Monday had yet another outstanding day of online spending with $2.67 billion in sales from desktop computers to once again rank as the heaviest online spending day of all-time," Fulgoni said in a statement. "The day remains the most important online shopping day of the year, driving an enormous amount of online retail traffic on both desktop and mobile devices.”

This story is part of our ongoing coverage of the 2016 holiday shopping season. You can browse our holiday page for more stories.