Amazon captured 31% of online spending over Cyber Weekend

Amazon captured 31% of online spending over Cyber Weekend

By Krystina Gustafson December 1, 2016

Target, Wal-Mart and Kohl's each set some sort of online record over the five-day shopping extravaganza that ended with Cyber Monday, but blockbuster digital growth for many bricks-and-mortar retailers wasn't enough to close the gap with Amazon.

According to new data by Slice Intelligence, which scanned more than 1 million online shopping receipts from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, Amazon accounted for 30.9 percent of sales. It was followed by Best Buy at 7.4 percent, Target at 4.4 percent, and Wal-Mart at 4.1 percent.

Best Buy, which entered the weekend fresh off a better-than-expected third-quarter earnings report, saw the biggest improvement of the top 10 retailers, growing its share of spending by 1.3 points over 2015. Apple also recorded a gain, closing the gap with larger chains like Nordstrom and Kohl's.

But Wal-Mart, which said it saw a record number of visits on its website from the start of Black Friday through Cyber Monday, fell back in the rankings, according to Slice. Whereas Wal-Mart's share of spend dipped 1 point to 4.1 percent, Target eked out a small gain, pushing it to 4.4 percent of spending.

Macy's, which suffered a massive site outage for much of Black Friday, saw its share dip slightly.

Broadly speaking, the larger bricks-and-mortar chains are the ones that are more effectively competing with Amazon, Adobe's Mickey Mericle told CNBC earlier this week. Over the five-day shopping stretch, those bigger chains grew their online sales at roughly 2½ times the rate of smaller players, Mericle said.

"They've figured out the key, which we're seeing is really the combination of social and mobile and email," she said.

Along with fine-tuning their messaging mix, major retailers have seen an uptick in the number of shoppers electing to use their in-store pickup services. At J.C. Penney, for example, one-third of online orders are now collected from its 1,000-plus locations.

From Nov. 1 to Nov. 28, retailers rang up $39.97 billion in online sales — a 7.6 percent increase over the same period last year, according to Adobe Digital Insights. That includes record-setting Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, and captures 80 percent of all transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers. (The firm does not disclose whether or not Amazon's sales are included.)

Adobe predicts online revenue will increase 11 percent this year, to $91.6 billion. And while a hefty chunk of this season's sales is sure to go to Amazon, there's room for traditional retailers to grab a piece as well.

"In a growing market, it's not a zero-sum game," Andrew Lipsman, vice president of marketing and insights for comScore, told CNBC.

ComScore's data show that Amazon, eBay, Wal-Mart, Kohl's and Target were the most visited retail websites on desktop computers and mobile devices on Cyber Monday.



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