E-Commerce

Holiday shoppers turned Cyber Monday into the biggest spending day ever with online sales growing 30.3 percent over the same period last year, according to cloud-based analytics findings by IBM. With an increase in online sales across multiple channels, the digital consumer took center stage. Retailers, marketing departments and chief marketing officers delivered a consistent customer experience across multiple channels from mobile devices, to online and to the show floor leading to the record shopping day.

Despite record levels of online spending over the Black Friday weekend, savvy shoppers still have plenty of appetite for one-day-only deals that retailers have lined up for Cyber Monday, as 129.2 million shoppers say they'll head to retailers’ websites on Cyber Monday. According to a survey conducted for Shop.org by BIGinsight, 129.2 million Americans plan to shop on Cyber Monday this year, up from the 122.8 million who shopped last year, and the 106.9 million who shopped on Cyber Monday in 2010. Eager to meet consumers’ demands, 85 percent of retailers will have a special promotion for Cyber Monday.

Some industry insiders believe Cyber Monday may have lost its oomph. According to Forbes, smart retailers this year noticed that the days before Cyber Monday were active shopping days and as a result ran pre-Cyber Monday sales, pre-Black Friday sales and Thanksgiving Day sales. The strategy worked. Black Friday weekend retail sales came in at $59.1 billion. But will these purchases cannibalize Cyber Monday sales? 

According to an IBM Benchmark report, mobile had a significant impact in lifting online sales on Thanksgiving by 17.4 percent over 2011. Here are some more key points from the report:

ShopRunner, a company that offers two-day shipping across a network of retailers, is debuting a new service, PickupPoints, which allows consumers to receive packages from purchases made online at local stores in their area. The company's service offers an Amazon Prime-like unlimited, free two-day shipping service from a number of online retailers with no minimum order size. The company's network includes Lord & Taylor, Toys"R"Us, Sports Authority, GNC, drugstore.com, Borders, PetSmart and Newegg.com.

While retailers might still be carting out decorations and Black Friday deals have yet to hit shelves, the holiday shopping season is already in full swing. Searches for "holiday gift" on Google have already spiked 156 percent since the first of November, and searches for "Black Friday" are up 546 percent. In the days leading up to the biggest shopping event of the year, we took a look at early trends in holiday shopping using Google Consumer Surveys and found that it's shaping up to be the first "nonline" holiday season. People are shopping earlier and shopping smarter, both online and in stores.

I have a girl crush on a fashion website called ModCloth. And I'm not the only one. ModCloth is an e-commerce business selling apparel, accessories and décor, and in a word, it's adorable. But don't let that fool you — the site may look as cozy as a kitten, but it's a lion in disguise. Modcloth is winning one of the most coveted audiences in the consumer marketplace: millennial women. Though definitions vary, millennials are generally described as people between 18 and 31 years old, who have grown up in the age of technology.

Cyber Monday sales will rise 18 percent to $2 billion this year in the U.S. and Europe, with mobile having a growing role in holiday buying, according to an Adobe Systems forecast. The projections are based on the software giant's analysis of 150 million visits to more than 500 retail sites over the last six years. Bricks-and-clicks retailers are expected to see the biggest sales spike on Cyber Monday — the Monday after Thanksgiving aimed at promoting online shopping. Business is expected to be up 450 percent compared to an average day.

hybris, the top-rated provider of omni-channel commerce software, today announced the results of the hybris 2012 State of B2B E-Commerce study. The study surveyed business-to-business (B2B) procurement specialists and found that despite respondents' preference for ordering products online, B2B supplier websites have a lot of room for improvement.

In 2005, someone at Shop.org, the e-commerce wing of the National Retail Federation, had an idea: Why not give online retail its own version of Black Friday? Online shopping was getting more popular every year, so it made sense to promote it with a holiday season day of its own. E-commerce sales were already showing a spike on the Monday following Black Friday, so Cyber Monday was born.