Sales are up 8.1% as of 6 p.m. ET, according to IBM Digital Analytics. The average order is $131.66, flat with last year, though the number of transactions is up and people are buying more items on average per order. Overall, the National Retail Federation expects fewer people to shop Cyber Monday, at about 127 million vs. 131 million in 2013.
But that may be because shoppers have more chances to get deals later in the week as Cyber Monday prices continue through Saturday with some brands. With promotions spread out across November and December this year and many retailers having offered pre-Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales to spur people to shop early, those days themselves have become less important as shopping drivers.
Meanwhile, more people than ever are opting to online shop and use their phones to browse for deals. Online sales over Thanksgiving weekend were up 17% vs. last year and mobile accounted for more than half of all online traffic, according to IBM. Monday, more people are shopping on desktops though mobile is still nearly 39% of all online traffic so far, IBM says.
Retailers are hopeful that online deals this week will be compelling enough to get shoppers to continue to spend. Walmart doubled the number of deals available for Cyber Monday this year and will continue to have 500 new promotions a day through Friday. Target is billing its Cyber Week as its biggest yet, with more than 100,000 items on sale all week. Kohl's is going a day further with deals online through Saturday. Old Navy and Gap are offering a blanket 40% off everything today. Amazon has new deals every 10 minutes.
Those deals may entice the roughly half of consumers who still have shopping to do, says Consumer Electronics Association Chief Economist Shawn DuBravac. "I would estimate probably close to half of consumers have completed the bulk of their holiday shopping at this point," he says. "There's probably a number of shoppers looking to round things out on Monday."
And he expects people to continue to buy leading up to Christmas. "There's still appetite as we head into the remaining few weeks of the holiday season," DuBravac says.
That appetite may be fed by increasing parity between online and in-store deals and the convenience of options like same-day shipping and buy online, pick up in store, all of which are making it easier for consumers to wait out the season for the best prices, says Lucinda Duncalfe, CEO of Monetate, a company that sells software to retailers to help them personalize the online shopping experience.
"You can shop online later and later and still get things by Christmas Day," she says. "What will end up happening over time is this continued flattening of the season where people are more willing to wait to see what's going to happen."
