According
to comScore sales were better than expected, but only due to aggressive offers:
“Mark Twain
might have said: ‘Rumors of the death of online holiday shopping have been
greatly exaggerated’,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni “Consumers are
clearly responding positively to retailers’ aggressive online discounts. With
Cyber Monday promotions beginning in earnest over the Thanksgiving weekend,
consumers have finally begun to open their wallets, setting off a streak of
four consecutive days of extremely strong growth, and culminating in a Cyber
Monday that racked up an impressive $846 million in online spending, up 15
percent over last year and ranking it as the second heaviest online spending
day on record. This is an extremely encouraging development for retailers and
we can but hope that their aggressive discounting has still left room for profits.”
The whole
press release is here: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2607
comScore
only tracks the top sites so is probably not that accurate for “Long Tail” (smaller/
specialty) retailers. Plus I don’t think they can actually track the value of purchases made
using SSL (https) which are the vast majority, so I’m not sure how they make
their estimates……and they only have 1m US members in their panel.
So, with all that said, their statistics are probably indicative but they don't publish their margin of error and there are a lot of assumptions that they don't go into when issuing their press releases......