According to Comscore, the online commerce world did not have a Blue Monday. Spending on “Black Monday” was up 15% year on year.
However, spending is down year over year in November – by 2%.
Update: for Search driven sales stats, check out this detailed post from Rimm Kaufman. From it:
Honestly, before running these numbers, I expected to see far far far worse results.
While the online retail 2008 holiday season isn’t starting out strong, it also isn’t starting out as a total disaster either.
While we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from a single day, I’m viewing CyberMonday 2008 as promising start, a tidbit of positive news about online retail and perhaps in turn about our national economy.
I suspect part of what’s happening is the substitution effect is finally becoming very clear with regard to e-commerce cannibalizing bricks-and-mortar. The equation is simple. Buy it on Amazon, get free shipping, get better prices in most cases, waste no time, spend no gas money, fight no crowds. I would be far more concerned if e-commerce were not able to pick up gross market share in a downturn than if it held even.
No one has died working security for an early morning Amazon sale…
Definitely preferred way to shop versus brick/mortar.