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 Sales on Cyber Monday, traditionally the busiest day of the year for
Internet shopping, were expected to finish up 12 percent from a year
earlier at $2.98 billion, according to Adobe Digital Index, part of
Adobe Systems Inc, which provides digital marketing and media
services to merchants. As of 10 a.m. ET on Monday, sales registered
at $490 million.
But 13 out of 100 product views returned an out-of-stock message
Monday morning, more than twice the rate on an average day,
according to Adobe.
"Consumers are hyped for Cyber Monday, with social buzz more
positive than what we saw on Black Friday, but they need to brace
themselves for the highest out-of-stock rates of the season so far,"
said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst at Adobe Digital Index.
Website outages and slow checkouts during the five-day shopping
spree that started on Thanksgiving were reported at luxury retailer
Neiman Marcus, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, L Brands Inc's Victoria Secret
and Foot Locker Inc. Slow service was also reported at payments
processor PayPal Inc.
The data underscores the ongoing shift in shopping online, which
makes up for slowing spending in stores. But product shortages raise
broader concerns about inventory planning by retailers during the
most crucial time of the year.
Adobe tracked 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100
U.S. retailers and said sales are on track to meet its expectation
of a record $3 billion by the end of Monday.
Retail stocks including Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target and Macy's Inc fell
between 1 and 3 percent on Monday.
Data from RetailNext showed overall in-store sales from Thursday to
Sunday fell 4.7 percent, with customer traffic down 5.1 percent .
Data from ChannelAdvisor, a retail technology and services firm,
showed marketplace sales at Amazon, which account for more than 40
percent of Amazon's total revenue, grew 22.4 percent, Google Inc's
Google Shopping marketplace grew 14.34 percent while eBay Inc rose
1.9 percent from midnight to noon Eastern time on Monday.
On Target's website, www.target.com, some shoppers looking for
bargains were greeted with an error message: "So sorry, but high
traffic's causing delays. If you wouldn't mind holding, we'll
refresh automatically & get things going ASAP."
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A Target spokeswoman said that as the website witnesses spikes in
traffic it places some guests in a queue, while millions of others
shopped on the website. She said Target's volume was already twice
as high as its busiest day ever.
Most U.S. retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy began
offering some of the season's best online deals, which traditionally
had been reserved for Cyber Monday, several weeks in advance.
Between Thanksgiving day and Cyber Monday, $11 billion will have
been spent online, a 15 percent increase from 2014, Adobe said.
Mobile devices, which include smartphones and tablets, drove 28
percent of online sales, Adobe said.
Mastercard, which tracks spending in its card network as well as
other forms of payments, said its data also showed a double-digit
jump in e-commerce sales from Thanksgiving to Sunday, above its
expectations for an 8 percent rise.
Mastercard said spending overall was brisk. It said specialty
apparel retailers saw sales pick up during the four-day period as
colder weather unleashed pent-up demand for winter clothing but that
revenue for department store chains and electronics retailers
remained subdued.
IBM has predicted that Cyber Monday online sales would grow by more
than 18 percent compared with 2014. IBM said e-commerce sales rose
26 percent on Saturday and Sunday compared with a year earlier.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Chicago; Editing by Nick Zieminski and
Leslie Adler)
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