Cyber Monday 2018 is projected to be the highest selling day of the holiday season this year, with $7.8 billion in online sales. And it’s no wonder: after a weekend of people juggling shopping online with shopping in stores, and hassling with each other in stores, today many go back to work. And so, we see a significant swing to online shopping.
Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across the US among major retailers online – predicts that today will see $7.8 billion in sales online today, up nearly 18 percent on 2017’s figure of $6.6 billion.
As of 7 AM PST / 10 AM EST on Monday, that prediction appears to be on track. Adobe says that consumers have already spent over half a billion dollars – $0.531 billion, specifically – with online retailers. (It will continue to update this figure throughout the day, and we will update as well.)
The report also suggests that Cyber Monday will be the best day to buy toys online, with savings of 19 percent on that product category. Some apparel, however, may be out-of-stock, Adobe says.
Although holiday spending used to kick off on Black Friday, e-commerce and the trend of shopping whenever you want — and not just when a store is open — has led to sales and seasonal promotions — and shopping — earlier and earlier. There has been $44.2 billion spent this month online so far, already passing Adobe’s full-month projections of $43 billion.
So far, the biggest spending day of the year has been Black Friday, where online US sales hit $6.2 billion dollars, with more than one-third of sales coming from mobile devices. Thanksgiving this year had a record $3.7 billion in sales, while one of the newer “shopping holidays,” Small Business Saturday, rung up $3.02 billion in online sales, said Adobe, up 25.5 percent.
But these are estimates, and so you are bound to get a lot of variation.
MasterCard provides a slightly more conservative figure: its SpendingPulse analytics predict that total sales “could exceed” $3 billion. It also estimated that last year’s Cyber Monday sale day brought in no more than $2.4 billion.
While Adobe says that it builds its estimates by tracking transactions at 80 of the biggest retailers online in the US, Mastercard tells us that SpendingPulse uses “national retail sales across all payments types in select markets around the world. The findings are based on aggregate sales activity in the Mastercard payments network, coupled with survey-based estimates for certain other payment forms, such as cash and check.”
The real numbers may lie somewhere in the middle.
Additional reporting: Sarah Perez