Wal-Mart said this year’s “Cyber Monday” saw the most online orders in a single day in the retailer behemoth’s history, with a bulk of traffic in the early days of the holiday season derived from mobile devices.
The retailer said customers viewed more than 1.5 billion pages on Walmart.com between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday — an industry term for the Monday that comes after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Mobile accounted for about 70% of the traffic over that five-day period, Wal-Mart (WMT) said.
Though the numbers look rosy, Wal-Mart didn’t provide any sales specific data. And while shoppers appeared to give retailers a lift on Monday with online sales rising 8.1% over last year’s numbers according to preliminary data from IBM’s Digital Analytics Benchmark, the increase wasn’t as strong as expected.
Reuters noted that observers had projected an increase between 13% to 15%. The growth also trails what was reported last year, when observers estimated that Cyber Monday sale rose as high as 21%.
Wal-Mart is trying to milk the Cyber Monday lingo for as long as possible. The retailer is calling this week “Cyber Week,” touting a handful of tech gadget promotions that will run for several days. That highlights what observers have noted this year: with deals spread across a longer stretch of time, the significance of sales on any one single day could be diminishing.