Cyber Monday sales up 5%, says comScore

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Online retailers are finding more money in their tills as consumers open up their wallets. Credit: House of Sims via Flickr.

Ka-ching! ComScore this morning reported that online retailers racked up $887 million in sales on Cyber Monday, up 5% from last year.

The amount is the highest single-day online spending on record after Dec. 9, 2008, when consumers splurged the exact same amount, comScore said.

Cyber Monday’s sales uptick came after a 10% jump on Thanksgiving day, followed by an 11% increase on Black Friday last week. The growth was ‘atypically strong’ said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.

The report mirrors similarly upbeat accounts from Coremetrics and PayPal.

Mondays continue to supply a sales jolt for online retailers, said Andrew Lipsman, comScore’s director of industry analysis. That’s because people tend to be most productive at the start of the week. The heightened efficiency extends to personal business as well as work-related tasks, he conjectured.

This year, for example, 52.7% of online purchases were made from work computers. Last year, the figure was 50.4%.

Retail sales still account for less than 5% of overall sales, so online performance is not a good indicator of the overall retail economy.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.