#FunFriday: Shopping Holiday Highlights!

Wow, what a day Monday was! I hope everyone had a productive and successful weekend with their sales over Black Friday and especially, Cyber Monday.

We had one of our more eventful days here at the ShareASale offices as everyone came back in from the holiday weekend with stories of their Thanksgivings and shopping trips and whatever other adventures they may have gotten into. Soon though, a focused silence fell over the office punctured only by the tapping of keyboards and voices talking through microphones as the busy day began. 

Cyber Monday 2016 Stats

Let’s take a look at some Cyber Monday overall statistics, not just ShareASale. According to an Adobe Digital Insights report, Cyber Monday produced $3.45 billion dollars in sales this year, which is up about 12% from last year. 

This isn’t that surprising as Cyber Monday sales have been on a consistent rise in the last few years, what does come as a surprise is that Black Friday’s online sales were quite close to Cyber Monday’s. There are a number of factors that could be behind this, but as we see more companies spreading their deals from Thanksgiving until Monday, it is my belief that you will see more of a “Cyber Sales Weekend” become the norm with different levels of sales based on time and date.

The most common items bought during Cyber Monday were tech gifts and toys due to major discounts on products such as tablets, home automation items and TV’s.

Online sales for Cyber Monday coming from mobile phones had quite a jump this year. With the proliferation of mobile apps, it’s now easier than ever to shop through your phone and it showed.

• Desktop Share of Visits: 47%
• Desktop Share of Purchases: 65%
• Mobile Share of Visits: 53%
• Mobile Share of Purchases: 35%
• Smartphone Share of Visits: 44%
• Smartphone Share of Purchases: 25%
• Tablet Share of Visits: 9%
• Tablet Share of Purchases: 10%

These stats were compiled in the Cyber Monday PM portion of the Adobe report. Obviously, desktop sales still are the highest but sales from mobile and smartphones are rising and the percentage will continue to grow in the coming years. I was surprised to see sales from tablets so low compared to phones, though.

Meanwhile….Back in Chicago

The day is going great! Everyone has their nose to the grindstone making sure our Merchants and Affiliates are having the most efficient Cyber Monday possible.

Suddenly, around 1 pm, a strange smell begins wafting from the microwave in our back kitchen. This quickly floods through the office and to everyone’s deep chagrin, we realize someone has broken “Office Rule #1” and it threatened to throw everything askew.

So after donning gas masks (kidding, it would have helped though) and a thorough roasting of the culprit, it was smooth sailing from there. We saw many success stories from our Merchant and Affiliate partners, and we are excited to see how the month of December will go as the holiday shopping season continues on! 

Make sure that you are posting in our Coupons and Deals database if you are a Merchant and Affiliates, use this database for holiday promotions and grab the RSS feed for it as well!