The holiday shopping season is officially in full swing and another record-breaking Cyber Monday is in the books. According to Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday grew 19.3% year-over-year and totaled $7.9 billion in online sales.
But one of the most interesting trends we noticed during the holiday shopping weekend — which we discussed yesterday on the blog — was the emergence of a potential new, major shopping holiday in the US: Thanksgiving Eve.
In yesterday’s post, we took a look at the first four days of the traditional Cyber 5, along with Thanksgiving Eve, and noted that sales appear to have shifted earlier in 2018, particularly for our clients on Amazon and eBay in the US. Now that Cyber Monday results are in, let’s take a look across the full six days from Wednesday last week through Cyber Monday to see what’s changed.
The chart below shows the total marketplaces GMV earned on our platform by our clients from Wednesday through Cyber Monday by percentage of GMV earned on each day in 2017 and 2018. Not surprisingly, Cyber Monday accounts for a large percentage of platform GMV across the six days. However, we can still see the trend of Wednesday accounting for a larger share of the six-day GMV in 2018 than it did in 2017 (14.4% vs. 11.4%), primarily at the expense of Cyber Monday.
As we mentioned yesterday, the story is a bit more interesting when you look at the top marketplaces and compare the US with the rest of the world. Again, we are telling the story by only highlighting the percentage of ChannelAdvisor clients that had their highest sales day on the days indicated across both 2017 and 2018.
Marketplace GMV in the US
On Amazon in the US, Cyber Monday was the highest GMV day of the six for more than 65% of clients on our platform. Wednesday was the next most prosperous day, with 11.7% of our clients having their highest GMV on that day. Black Friday was the highest GMV day for 11% of our clients, down substantially from the five-day view published yesterday. This is because 72% of clients that had their best day of the first five days on Black Friday ultimately bested their Black Friday results on Cyber Monday.
You can see that the trend we discussed yesterday of GMV skewing earlier in the week still holds when including Cyber Monday in the data. More of our clients had their best day on Wednesday this year than last year. The number of clients with the highest platform GMV on Black Friday and Cyber Saturday, though small, were also up slightly over last year.
Nearly 35% of our clients on eBay US had their best day on our platform on Cyber Monday. However, many more of the eBay US sellers on our platform had their highest GMV day on Wednesday this year than last year (26% versus 12%).
Yesterday, we noted that Black Friday was the most important day of the first five days for more than half our clients using our platform to sell on Walmart. After incorporating Cyber Monday’s data, it’s clear that Cyber Monday is still very important on Walmart, although slightly fewer of our clients (62.5% vs. 57.2%) had their best day on Cyber Monday this year. Wednesday and Black Friday accounted for the majority of the difference.
Marketplace GMV Outside the US
Outside of the US, Cyber Monday wasn’t as important as Black Friday for the clients on our platform on either Amazon or eBay.
On Amazon sites outside of the US, 32% of our clients had their best day of the six on Black Friday, which was very similar to last year. Fewer of these clients had their best days on Cyber Monday this year; more had their highest day on Wednesday and Thursday (a non-holiday outside of the US).
On eBay sites outside of the US, the top days for our clients were much more evenly spread out. Still, as with Amazon’s global sites, the highest percentage of our clients had their best day on our platform on Black Friday. As highlighted yesterday, their sales were slightly more font-loaded over the first three of the six-day period.
In summary, Cyber Monday was more important for our clients in the US than our clients outside the US. And, as we saw yesterday, GMV tended to be more front-loaded this year within the Cyber Week (Cyber 6? Cyber 7?) than last.
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