More shoppers are choosing clicks over crowds as the holiday season gets underway.
Black Friday's digital sales hit a record $7.4 billion, according to a survey of 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers by Adobe Analytics. Cellphone purchases drew a record $2.9 billion in sales.
Those numbers likely will get surpassed by Cyber Monday, which consistently ranks as the biggest online shopping day of the year. Adobe predicts Monday's sales event will draw a record $9.4 billion.
Cyber Monday was fashioned by retailers in 2005 when shopping by computer was so new that many people waited until Monday when they were back at work — with faster internet connections — to do some additional holiday shopping.
Major retail chains, including Minnesota's largest players, Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. Inc., have sunk millions into restructuring their supply chains to compete with Amazon on speedy shipping and to create a seamless shopping experience for online and in-store customers. Target said that 80% of shoppers' orders on Sunday were packed up and shipped out of its stores.
"The fundamentals of retail are price, product and convenience. Those fundamentals don't really change," said Michael Sansone, a Minneapolis-based retail consultant at A.T. Kearney.
"If you look at the retail losers, they're on top of one or two. Winners are hitting on all three."
In the battle for clicks, Target and Walmart saw a bigger percentage increase in online activity during the first two weeks of November compared with this time last year, according to an analysis of 1.2 million online transactions by Edison Trends. E-commerce spending at Walmart jumped 51%, while Target rose 47%.
