Winter Holidays

Mahwah, New Jersey - Ascena Retail Group’s first quarter profit topped estimates as strong online growth helped make up for falling same-store sales. The company, which operates the Lane Bryant, Cacique, Maurices, Dressbarn, Catherines, Justice and Brothers brands, reported net income of $53.5 million, compared to $52.6 million in the year-ago period.

Net sales of $1.2 billion for the first quarter were flat compared to the year-ago period. Same-store sales fell 4% while online sales surged 16%.

New York – Cyber Monday lived up to the reputation of the gloomy start of the work week, with Internet traffic attributed to online consumer retail shopping activities decreasing 25 points from the prior day. According to the Verizon Retail Index, year-over-year, Cyber Monday’s results were down six points compared to Cyber Monday in 2013.

Morrisville. N.C. – Online sales for the total “Cyber Five” five-day period from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday rose 20.6% from the same period in 2013. According to analysis from ChannelAdvisor, the biggest increase occurred Cyber Saturday (27%) and smallest occurred on Cyber Monday (16.7%).

New York – If you were looking for quality call center service from an online retailer during Black Friday or Cyber Monday, then you wanted to shop at L.L. Bean. According to data from analysis firm StellaService, L.L. Bean led in customer service call response time on Black Friday (10 seconds), Cyber Monday (six seconds) and Cyber Weekend (nine seconds).

L.L. Bean actually improved its call center response time compared to its month-to-date average. Other notable findings included:

San Francisco - Most consumers do not feel safe when shopping online and many are shying away from their favorite retailers as a result. According to the ‘Trust in the Internet’ survey of 10,000 U.S. and U.K. consumers from NCC Group and IDG, nearly eight out of 10 people (77%) do not feel very safe when shopping online and, with the holidays just a few weeks away, nearly a quarter reveal they are doing less online due to security concerns (23%).

New York – Black Friday was a more social event than Cyber Monday, with 3.5 million tweets and 838 million impressions compared to 839,000 tweets and 309 million impressions. According to a study from StatSocial, women were more likely than men to socially comment on both events, accounting for 59% of

Black Friday comments and 63% of Cyber Monday comments.

Armonk, N.Y. – Mobile traffic and sales trends indicate that Cyber Monday is increasingly becoming an event consumers take with them wherever they go. According to IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark data, Cyber Monday mobile traffic accounted for 41.2% of all online traffic, up 30.1% from 2013.  

Washington, D.C. – In-store sales were down from Thanksgiving Day through Black Friday, but the culprit may have been early holiday shopping more than lackluster consumer interest. According to the Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) Index of U.S. same-store sales, in-store sales dropped 5.8% during that two-day period compared to the previous year.

San Jose, Calif. - Total online sales for Cyber Monday came in at $2.65 billion, up 16% compared to 2013. According to data from Adobe Systems, the top 25 retailers, who each generated $30 million or more on Cyber Monday, saw online sales increase by 25%, capturing nearly $1.8 billion.
Smaller retailers, those generating $2 million or less, grew sales by 5%. Consumers saw the highest discounts of 23% in the early morning hours and more than half (54%) of online sales occurred outside of normal working hours.