US Cyber Monday online sales are set to surpass expectations by hitting a record of $3.39 billion on what many believe to be the busiest day of online shopping so far this year.

Industry observers, who had seen a very big jump in Black Friday sales, expected this year’s Cyber Monday to be lower but this proved otherwise. While brick and mortar shops saw slower sales, this was offset by online sales.

Nationwide, US online retailers saw sales up 10.2% from a year ago. Industry observers expected it to be in the region of $3.36bn.

The latest hard figures by Adobe Digital Insights were at 12pm Eastern Standard Time on Monday where figures were $1.19 billion, while the rest of the data for Cyber Monday will be available on Wednesday.

Compared to Black Friday and Thanksgiving, the rate of growth was slower for Cyber Monday. Sales grew by 21.6% on Black Friday and by 11.5% on Thanksgiving.

Adobe Digital Insights collects the data by measuring 80% of online transactions from the top 100 US retailers. For every $10 at the top 500 retailers, $7.50 passes through the Adobe Marketing Cloud sales platform.

One of the winners on Cyber Monday was Amazon which said it was on track to have its ‘best Cyber Monday in its history’ while orders on its mobile app are higher than last year. Walmart observed that purchases made on its mobile app leapt by 150% compared to last year.

Jet.com, recently bought by Walmart attributed this success to the US Presidential Election. “The U.S. election dominated the news cycle and the time people spent online and a lot of what we are seeing online is a condensing of that demand into a shorter time period,” said Liza Landsman, chief marketing officer at Jet.com.

 
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