
The figures are now in for consumer spending on Cyber Monday, the third big online spending day — alongside Thanksgiving and Black Friday — in the first critical week of the holiday shopping season.
On Monday, as many U.S. consumers returned to work after the long weekend, online shopping continued to power ahead spurred by big discounts of as much as 40% on average for some items. Adobe said that shoppers spent $13.3 billion online in the U.S. on the day. Salesforce has some slightly more sobering figures. It said that U.S. consumers spent $12.8 billion, while global spending was $49.7 billion.
Adobe's numbers are up 7.3% on 2023, while Salesforce tracked global growth of 3% and U.S. growth of just 2%.
On an international scale, the amount spent on Monday falls well below the online exuberance of Black Friday. On that day, Salesforce said shoppers globally spent a record-breaking $74.4 billion, and $17.6 billion in the U.S. (Thanksgiving: $33.6 billion spent online globally.)
The numbers are nevertheless an indication that the holiday online sales season overall kicked off on an upswing. Adobe said the total figure for the U.S. is up 7% compared to 2023, when consumers spent $12.4 billion. It also describes Cyber Monday as “the biggest online shopping day of all time” — which it is, based on Adobe's figures.
Cyber Week is the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday — no, it's not really seven days, but the supersized-spend on each day perhaps justifies calling it a week — and Adobe said that the full “week” brought in $41.1 billion in the U.S., up 8.2% on 2023. Adobe is tracking the full holiday season to total $240.8 billion in the U.S., up 8.4%.
Salesforce's global figures for the week were $314.9 billion, up 6% versus 2023, with and $76 billion in the U.S., up 7%.
Boston, MA July 15
Adobe and Salesforce are the most comprehensive of the firms tracking online sales in real time, although their methodologies differ: Adobe says its data is based on 1 trillion visits tracked to U.S. retail sites, covering some 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories in all. Salesforce says its 2024 figures are based on shopping data from 1.5 billion consumers captured across its customers and other data feeds in its Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud.
Interestingly, while Salesforce's total figures for Black Friday diverged from Adobe's by nearly $7 billion (Adobe estimated $10.8 billion), the two are in stronger agreement for Cyber Monday.
Meanwhile, Shopify, which bases its figures on data from Shopify merchants, said that they made $11.5 billion in sales globally over Cyber Week from more than 76 million shoppers. The sales figure is a record high, Shopify said, and it is up 24% compared to the same period in 2023. That’s perhaps more a measure of Shopify’s growth than it is of e-commerce sales overall.
A few extra data points:
- Electronics had the biggest discounts yesterday in the U.S., said Adobe, on average around 30.1%, but toys and consumer electronics — in keeping with it being a season for holiday present shopping — continue to be the most popular category. Salesforce found globally that makeup and apparel had the biggest average markdowns at 40% and 39%, respectively.
- Mobile shopping accounted for 57% of all sales, working out to $7.6 billion in spend. It continues to grow faster than overall online shopping growth (that figure is 13.3% higher than last year).
- BNPL — buy now, pay later schemes — drove nearly $1 billion in all spend, a high for the payment method. It’s not clear if that indicates more trust in BNPL as a credit alternative — no comparable stats are available on that front — or simply the fact that people just don't have as much spare cash as they would like. More than three-quarters of all BNPL transactions are made on mobile.
- Inflation does not appear to be a factor in overall spending numbers, said Adobe. Its price index indicates that prices have been falling for the last 26 months (2.9% down as of October 2024, compared to a year before, which is interesting when you consider that inflation was 2.6% in the same period).