Adobe reports record Cyber Monday sales

Online sales on Cyber Monday increased by 16% to $2.29 billion compared to last year, according to Adobe’s Digital Index 2013, and a record 18.3% of those sales came from mobile devices — a surge of 80% compared to last year.



Consumer shopping preferences continued to shift online with Cyber Monday being the fifth day in a row of record-breaking online sales. While “brick and click” retailers dominated Thanksgiving weekend sales, Internet retailers generated the most sales on Cyber Monday with a 42% share.



Adobe’s online shopping data is based on the analysis of nearly 900 million visits to 2,000 retailers’ websites on Cyber Monday and more than 3 billion visits since Thanksgiving Day. Total online sales for Cyber Monday came in just 1% above Adobe’s prediction from Nov. 5. The data also showed that 70% of online sales with the top 500 U.S. retailers — taken from Internet Retailer’s top 500 list — are generated by companies using Adobe Analytics, a key component of Adobe Marketing Cloud.

“Retailers earned 10% of their holiday sales in just the last five days, an increase of 26% year-over-year,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Index.



Smartphones and tablets drove $419 million in online sales on Cyber Monday, a new record according to Adobe. Tablets generated the majority of mobile-driven sales at 12.7% of total online sales. iPad took the lion’s share with 10.1% while Android based tablets generated $23 million or 1% of total sales. Alaska and Hawaii had the largest mobile sales revenue with 26.6% compared to the 18% national average.



Social media sites drove $148 million in online sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, a 2% share and flat compared to last year. Twitter’s share grew most (up 24%) to 9% of total online sales. Pinterest also saw strong growth increasing its share of referral traffic by 17% year-over-year. Facebook drove 64% of all social media driven sales, an increase of 12%.



iPad continued to generate the most social media buzz of any tablet followed by the Samsung Galaxy tablet. PlayStation 4 was the leader in social media traffic on game consoles in the last five days.



Although retail promotions dramatically impacted Black Friday, pushing online sales up 39% year-over-year, Cyber Monday shopping patterns were consistent with previous years. Cyber Monday sales peaked between 8 and 9 p.m. EST with sales bringing in $150 million in one hour.