The figures are now in for spend on Cyber Monday, the third big online spending day — alongside Thanksgiving and Black Friday — in the first, critical week of the holiday shopping season. 

Overall, as many U.S. consumers returned to work after the long weekend, online shopping continued to power ahead spurred by big discounts of as much as 40% on average for some items. Adobe said that shoppers spent $13.3 billion online in the U.S. on the day. Salesforce has some slightly more sobering figures. It said that globally, consumers spent $49.7 billion, and in the U.S. $12.8 billion. 

Adobe’s numbers are up 7.3% on 2023, while Salesforce says its global figures show growth of 3% and in the U.S. just 2%.

On an international scale, the amount spent on Monday falls well below the online exuberance of Black Friday. On that day, Salesforce said shoppers globally spent a record-breaking $74.4 billion, and $17.6 billion in the U.S. (Thanksgiving: $33.6 billion spent online globally.)

The numbers are nevertheless an indication that the holiday online sales season overall kicked off on an upswing. Adobe said the total figure for the U.S. is up 7% compared to 2023, when consumers spent $12.4 billion. It also describes Cyber Monday as “the biggest online shopping day of all time” — which it is, based on Adobe’s figures.

Cyber Week is the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday — no, it’s not really seven days, but the supersized-spend on each day perhaps justifies calling it a week  — and Adobe said that the full “week” brought in $41.1 billion in the U.S., up 8.2% on 2023. Adobe is tracking the full holiday season to total $240.8 billion in the U.S., up 8.4%.

Salesforce’s global figures for the week were $314.9 billion, up 6% versus 2023, with and $76 billion in the US, up 7%.

“While Cyber Monday remained the season’s and year’s biggest online shopping day, year-over-year growth was stronger on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst, Adobe Digital Insights, in a statement. “Early discounts were strong enough that many consumers felt comfortable hitting the buy button earlier on during Cyber Week, with Cyber Monday becoming ‘last call’ for shoppers to take advantage of big holiday deals.”   

Salesforce and Adobe are the most comprehensive of the firms tracking online sales in real-time, although their methodologies differ: Salesforce said its 2024 figures are based on shopping data from 1.5 billion consumers captured across its customers and other data feeds in its Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud. Adobe says its data is based on 1 trillion visits tracked to U.S. retail sites, covering some 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories in all. 

Interestingly, while Salesforce’s total figures for Black Friday diverged from Adobe’s by nearly $7 billion (Adobe estimated $10.8 billion), the two are in stronger agreement for Cyber Monday

A few extra data points:

• Electronics had the biggest discounts yesterday in the U.S., said Adobe, on average around 30.1%, but toys and consumer electronics — in keeping with it being a season for holiday present shopping — continue to be the most popular category. Salesforce found globally that makeup and apparel, at 40% and 39%, had the biggest average markdowns. 
• Mobile shopping accounted for 57% of all sales, working out to $7.6 billion in spend. It continues to grow faster than overall online shopping growth (that figure 13.3% higher than last year). 
• BNPL — buy now, pay later schemes — drove nearly $1 billion in all spend, a high for the payment method. Not clear if that indicates more trust in BNPL as a credit alternative — no comparable stats available on that front — or simply the fact that people just don’t have as much spare cash as they would like. More than three-quarters of all BNPL transactions are made on mobile.
• Inflation does not appear to be the driver of overall spending numbers, said Adobe. Its price index indicates that prices have been falling for the last 26 months (2.9% down as of October 2024, compared to a year before, which is interesting when you consider that inflation was 2.6% in the same period), which points again to discounts driving people to spend at a time when they are feeling less secure economically.