Visitors to e-commerce sites spent $846 million on Monday, an increase of 15 percent over the same day a year ago, according to ComScore.
Monday, referred to as Cyber Monday by online retailers, capped off a successful Thanksgiving holiday weekend for the industry, which overall saw spending jump 13 percent.
It's a welcome relief for an industry that was mostly bracing for the worst.
"Consumers are clearly responding positively to retailers' aggressive online discounts," ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement. "With Cyber Monday promotions beginning in earnest over the Thanksgiving weekend, consumers have finally begun to open their wallets, setting off a streak of four consecutive days of extremely strong growth..."
ComScore ranks the $846 million spent Monday as the second-biggest day of online shopping ever. That should be encouraging to retailers, since typically Cyber Monday isn't the biggest spike in online sales for the holiday season, just the first, according to retail analysts.
It also comes on the heels of a better-than-expected Black Friday shopping day, so the retail picture this holiday may not be quite as dreary as expected. What remains to be seen, however, is whether retailers were able to draw any sort of profit after the aggressive promotions that clearly attracted shoppers.
Consumer spending on e-commerce sites grew just 1 percent during October compared with the same month a year ago, according to ComScore.
In fact, last month was the worst growth month for online retail spending since ComScore began keeping track in 2001.
Rising prices and unemployment rates, and the psychological impact of the chaos of the financial markets are to blame, according to ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.
But the dip in spending can't be too much of a shock to those who watch ComScore's monthly reports carefully. The preceding six months featured declining growth rates--April saw 15 percent growth, and by August spending online had increased just 8 percent.
Spending has dropped off the most for households that make below $50,000 per year, according to ComScore's figures. From August to October this year, their spending dropped 3 percent compared with the same period last year. For households making between $50,000 and $100,000, their spending increased 1 percent. Households making more than $100,000 increased their spending during that time by 14 percent.
Retailers both online and off are fretting how the economic downturn will affect this year's holiday sales. E-commerce giants Amazon.com and eBay both offered dim holiday outlooks during their third-quarter earnings reports.
In response, earlier this month ComScore recommended that online retailers should seriously consider generous coupon offers and free shipping to encourage consumers to spend in the coming months.
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