Holiday season shopping on internet spread out beyond Cyber Monday

Sales growth on Cyber Monday declines despite retailers' efforts to lure them with one-day sales

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Amazon.com has installed more than 15,000 robots across 10 US warehouses, a move that promises to cut operating costs by one-fifth and get packages out the door more quickly in the run-up to Christmas. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 4:07am, 3 Dec 2014

Cyber Monday sales growth is slowing in the US as consumers embrace the convenience of online shopping, spreading out their purchases instead of being lured by one-day specials.

Internet holiday shopping rose 8.1 per cent on Cyber Monday, typically the busiest day for Web shopping as people return to their desks after the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend. But that compares with online sales growth of 17.5 per cent posted on the same day a year earlier, according to International Business Machines.

The declining pace of growth reflects an earlier start to the year-end shopping season, with Amazon.com and other online retailers offering online deals a week before Black Friday, when stores traditionally began offering holiday discounts. With people shopping online more frequently, ecommerce on Saturday and Sunday was up 17 per cent compared with the same weekend last year, according to IBM, which began measuring pre-Cyber Monday sales last year in response to shoppers' changing habits. "We're still getting really strong growth on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but people are realising it's a season of shopping," Soren Mills, chief marketing officer at Newegg, an online electronics retailer. "We're releasing new deals all the time. We refresh constantly and bring in new deals to keep the excitement there. People are turning it from a day-long occasion to a month-long occasion."

The Cyber Monday sales slowdown took place even as Amazon, EBay and other online retailers cut prices on electronics to lure shoppers. Amazon touted its Fire TV streaming device for US$69 as part of its Cyber Monday promotions. EBay featured discounts on laptops and notebooks of various brands. Newegg started its holiday shopping deals on November 26, with sales until November 30 climbing 15 per cent, Mills said.

"It's not like the day isn't growing, it's just that the additional growth is being spread more evenly on other days," said Jay Henderson, strategy programme director at IBM.

Cyber Monday is typically seen as an opportunity for retailers to "stem some of the bleeding", said Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.