What was once Black Friday’s little sister, now buys her own diamonds and buys her own rings. Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year and 2017 was no exception.

Record Sales

This year’s Cyber Monday was the US’ largest online shopping day in the history of forever with $6.59 BILLION sales – more than a billion dollar increase on 2017. Mobile sales also broke records, reaching their first ever $2 billion day – congrats! Over the pond, in the UK we saw a 3% increase in online sales compared to last year. High fives all round.

Popular Items

58% of shoppers were updating their wardrobe, whilst others were giving Santa’s elves a helping hand, buying toys (38%), books and other media (31%) and electronics (30%) and some were giving the gift of cards-gift cards (23%).

Popular Retailers

140 million Americans visited online retailers on Cyber Mon (surpassing Black Friday by 11 million!):

– 77 million via desktop

– 103 million by mobile

– 40 million on both! (Get you, you multitaskers!)

Popular online marketplaces included:

Shopify, who reported a 60% increase in mobile sales;

Amazon, who was once again the most visited online marketplace and experienced their biggest day, e-v-e-r (beating even Prime day 2017); and

eBay, who too shared the love with their b-i-g-g-e-s-t day in their 22-year history.

Small Business & Multichannel Selling

Amazon also reported their “biggest day ever for small businesses and entrepreneurs”- 140 million items to be precise.

However, what was most interesting about Cyber Monday was that 42.6% of online sales were driven by search results (23.3% paid and 19.3% organic), with direct traffic and email only accounting for 25.5% and 24% of sales.

This is a great example of why multichannel selling is so important: consumers head where the search results take them and if their search results are taking them to Amazon, eBay or Etsy, and you’re not there, you lose. Appearing on all three, alongside your website’s own shopping cart, means that you have every chance to greet shoppers wherever their search result ping them.

Plus, with multichannel management software, such as Expandly, available to make multichannel management easy and affordable, you’d be a cotton headed ninny muggins to miss out.

How Did You Do?

We’d love to hear how our Expandly users fared in the Black Friday mayhem. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter now.