Forget Cyber Monday: It’s A $6 Billion “Cyber Week” Now

Tired of hearing about “Cyber Monday”? I’m not. In fact, I can’t get enough shopping data, which just keep rolling in from seemingly innumerable sources. Now our friends at comScore have opened the aperture a bit on holiday online shopping with some new “Cyber Week” data.

The $6 Billion Cyber Week

The metrics firm said that online shopping for holiday 2011 has already reached $18.7 billion (a 15 percent increase vs. a year ago). Driven by aggressive pricing and free shipping, US consumers spent almost $6 billion in the week following the Thanksgiving holiday.

Free Shipping Desired

Free shipping is a critical trigger of online consumer spending. Seventy eight percent of consumers told comScore that free shipping was critical or somewhat important to their decision to buy online.

Digital Purchases Big For Mobile Shopping

Mobile shopping also saw a lot of action and received a great deal of coverage during the post-holiday data deluge.  In a separate release out today comScore discussed “m-commerce” buying. The charts below highlight the top mobile purchase categories — almost half of smartphone owners have bought something on their phones at some point — and the location of those purchases.

Mobile Shopping Happens Most At Home

More interesting than the purchase categories is the location information. More than half (56 percent) of smartphone buyers did their buying at home. We can assume that most of them own PCs but chose to use their mobile devices instead. A substantial minority (42 percent) bought things on their phones at work — where they presumably probably also have PCs.

Finally nearly 40 percent (36 percent) of these respondents bought things “in store.” In all likelihood that looks something like this: a consumer in Best Buy, for example, confirms she wants a particular TV and then buys it online for less. It could also be people buying products out of stock or too large to take home that day.

Research from several firms has shown that a poor mobile site experience will cause consumer abandonment. However a majority of retailers still don’t have mobile-optimized sites. If that’s true it’s probably too late for Holiday 2011.

(Stock image courtesy of Shutterstock.com and used with permission.)