by Ralph Eck
| Dec 06, 2013
Thirty years ago stores came up with the Christmas season marketing idea of “Midnight Madness” shopping events. This was followed by the birth of Black Friday and now we see the next shift in the Santa season — Cyber Season Santa! Year on year, even in the throws of the economic crisis, the numbers coming in from online shopping have been astounding and 2013 has been a record breaker for sure.
The early forecasts for this Christmas shopping season were already impressive compared to lastyears. As you can see in the infographic below, the combined online shopping revenues of just three days (Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday) come up to a whopping $4,990,000,000.00!
Well the actual numbers are in and once again the real sales exceeded the forecasts. During the 3 days of shopping the total actually was $5,280,000,000.00. Below we can see how this compares with the previous year, which was a record setter in itself was back then.
I don’t know about you but these numbers are just too large for me to fathom. Let me try and break this down to the kinds of numbers you and I might be more comfortable with. See the table below.
Overall, at this point in time the cyber season numbers of this year are an amazing 25% higher than last year. Considering the gloom and doom that we all have been reading about the world economic crisis we have been mired in for the past few years these are amazing numbers. But let’s tale a look at this from the perspective of “how many” of certain things could be purchased with this much cash.
Year by year the shopping habits of the world change and progress. No longer do you have to wander aimlessly around department stores search for the perfect gift. Now you can do it all from the comfort of your living room with a glass of nice eggnog. Some interesting behavior number are showing how we are shifting even our online shopping habits. This holiday season 78% of the American shoppers will make online purchases, nearly 70% of the online purchases will be made using a mobile device (smartphone and tablets), 27% of the cyber Monday shoppers will be online before 6 a.m., 80% of online sales (excluding travel) are made in the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas, the average online purchase is $193 (consisting of 9 items) and the big five on Cyber Monday (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, Target and J.C. Penney) will have a combined total of 76,900,000 online visits.
Looking at these number I get perspective but am left with one major curiosity. How the heck is Santa gonna get all this into his sleigh?
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