Garden of solitary delights

Cyber Monday (Nov. 26) online spending totaled a record $733 million — a 21 percent increase versus last year and an 84 percent jump from the average daily online spending totals in the preceding four weeks — according to comScore, reports MarketingCharts.

More than $10.7 billion has been spent online during the holiday season to date, or 17 percent more than the corresponding days last year, comScore said.

"Cyber Monday once again set a record with $733 million in sales, the first time a single day of online retail spending has broken the $700 million threshold," said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.

"While that makes it the heaviest online shopping day on record, we expect that a number of individual shopping days during the coming weeks will surpass the Cyber Monday total, with some days potentially surpassing $800 million."

Other Cyber Monday findings:

• The number of online buyers was up 38 percent compared with Cyber Monday 2006, while the average dollars spent per buyer was down 12 percent - possibly due to two factors - deeper and broader price discounts offered by online merchants this year and the fact that "new Cyber Monday buyers" tended to spend less online than returning buyers.
• 6 percent of the internet users on Cyber Monday made an online purchase.
• 44 percent of internet users on Cyber Monday shopped online (i.e., visited an online retail site or used a comparison-shopping engine)
• 60 percent of dollars spent online on Cyber Monday came from work computers, with the balance coming from home and university computers.

Top Retail Sites' Cyber Monday Traffic

On Cyber Monday, most of the top online retail sites experienced significant gains in number of visitors:

• Amazon Sites, which had the most visitors, was up 26 percent versus the same day last year and up 50 percent compared with the average number of daily visitors during the four weeks leading up to Cyber Monday.
• Six out of the top 10 retail sites' visitors more than doubled compared with their daily average over the four weeks preceding Cyber Monday.
• Apple's modest gains were the result of consistently high traffic levels during the weeks preceding Cyber Monday.

Weekly Online Holiday Retail Sales, 2003-2007, through Week 4 ('07):