Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT), and other brick-and-mortar retailers have been talking up their digital sales performance over the Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend and into Cyber Monday.
Target, for one, said its site had twice as much traffic on Monday as its previous record day, which led it to put up a “digital velvet rope,” rendering target.com inaccessible for a brief period. Meanwhile, Walmart said nearly half of its online orders since Thanksgiving were placed on a mobile device, validation of its strategy of doubling down on its apps.
Those are positive developments for both retailers as they try to grab their share of the e-commerce boom. But as the dust settles on the big shopping event, it’s clear Walmart and Target face a massive challenge in catching Amazon.com (AMZN): the online-only retailer is clearly top of mind with consumers and commentators.
According to ListenFirst, a data and analytics company that tracks social media mentions, Amazon received almost 10 times as many mentions on Twitter during CyberMonday than Walmart: 509,000 to 51,100. Target, though a much smaller digital retailer than Walmart, got 112,000 mentions. Though lets not give Target too much credit: a lot of that probably had to do the web site’s problems, which create some anger in social media.
Amazon’s social media prominence is translating into big sales: Channel Advisor on Tuesday estimated that Amazon’s sales on Cyber Monday rose a staggering 21.1%. That performance is above the 16% overall growth Adobe reported for digital sales across the industry, and all the more impressive given that Amazon is old hat at this and is working off a bigger base than rivals. (Target and Amazon do not break out sales figures for the weekend.)
Of course, that won’t translate into 12 times more sales. Amazon’s annual digital sales in the 12 months to October were about six times greater than Walmart‘s and 29 times larger than Target’s, according to eMarketer, as Fortune reported last month.
But what it does show is how much Amazon owns mindshare, something that came in handy on the biggest online shopping day ever, when retailers rang in $3 billion in digital sales.
