Early stats show Cyber Monday 2017 could be biggest ever

Cyber Monday 2017 could become the biggest online shopping day in history, according to data from Adobe Analytics.

As of 4:30pm ET Monday afternoon, Cyber Monday shoppers collectively spent $3.38 billion on online purchases, a jump of almost 17 percent from last year.

It’s not just how much money we’ve spent that’s interesting—but how we’re shopping. Smartphone and tablet purchases represented 53.3 percent of visits and nearly 40 percent of revenue during the online-focused shopping “holiday.” Compared to last year, this means smartphone traffic grew 21 percent and revenue grew 41 percent.

That’s not insignificant. The uptick is perhaps largely due to the proliferation of retailer-specific apps in the App Store and Google Play, and the fact that purchasing through the apps is now a relatively painless experience. I can attest to that personally: For the past few years, I’ve never really partaken in Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales events. However, I found myself downloading a handful of new shopping apps to scope out deals last night while watching TV.

Adobe’s data covers approximately 80 percent of online transactions from 100 of the largest U.S. online retailers, so it’s a pretty good snapshot of the larger Cyber Monday sphere as a whole.

As evening descends on the end of the Black Friday shopping spectacular, it will be interesting to see if purchases spike some more. No doubt I’ll eventually follow through on some of those items I carted later today. There are just way too many good deals to ignore.

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