More Americans Shopped Online Than in Stores This Weekend

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More Americans Shopped Online Than in Stores This Weekend

 

Every day is turning into Cyber Monday.
At least that’s the indication from National Retail Federation estimates that found the number of Americans shopping online creeped past those who went out into the world over the long Thanksgiving weekend. The industry group’s survey found that an estimated 151 million people shopped either in stores, online, or both over the weekend. Of those, nearly 102 million of them headed to stores, while more than 103 million said they shopped online.
“Just as many people want that unique, exclusive online deal as they do that in-store promotion,” NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay said.
The group’s report was released yesterday, which means today’s Cyber Monday bonanza isn’t even included in those numbers.  According to an estimate from Forrester Research, online holiday sales in the US are expected to be a hefty more than $95 billion. Cyber Monday alone could bring in $2 billion in online sales, Forrester says. The NRF estimates that more than 121 million people plan to shop online today.
Compared to the past, what exactly does this mean? The NRF’s methodology for its survey has changed, so it says comparisons to its results last year aren’t valid. But a report from IBM noted that online Black Friday shopping saw an increase of 21.5 percent over last year. ComScore’s numbers were more conservative, estimating that online shopping from desktop computers increased by 10 percent. Meanwhile, analytics company ShopperTrak says that while it expects an increase in brick-and-mortar sales during the 2015 holiday season as a whole, preliminary estimates show that IRL stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday had “thinner crowds” compared to last year. All of which to say—ho, ho, ho, we love to shop. But we’d rather stay home to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Target Shoppers Wait in Line, Online, on Cyber Monday

What happens when shoppers flock to a store en masse? They wait in line—which is exactly what many are doing at Target today, except they’re waiting in line online.
For Cyber Monday, the megastore is offering 15 percent off of any items online to all shoppers. The only problem: Target’s site couldn’t quite handle the influx of traffic drawn by such a deal. Some shoppers vented their frustration on Twitter:
As #targetfail catches on, Target, of course, is trying to stay positive—and has been responding to some tweeters in kind.
A representative for the company tells WIRED that the volume of traffic today is double the site’s previous record, set three days ago on Black Friday. The spokeswoman said that while the site hasn’t crashed per se, the company has been “metering” the site’s traffic since 9am CST, when the company saw its biggest spike. The company would not provide further details about its backend operations.
As Target stumbles, Jeff Bezos, the founder of digital-first retailer Amazon, must surely be smirking. Despite huge promotions on its site, Amazon hasn’t experienced this kind of mass outage in the past few days.
But even tech companies aren’t always safe as online shopping continues to grow in popularity, especially during the holiday push. PayPal went down briefly this morning as customers tried to check out on third-party sites. Maybe everyone should add some extra bandwidth to their holiday wish lists this year.

 

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