U.S. shoppers’ total spending on Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, is anticipated to reach a record high this year amid a post-election boost in consumer confidence.
Adobe Analytics, which tracks online shopping, anticipates a record $13.2 billion in sales on Dec. 2, up by 6.1 percent from last year.
Peak shopping hours are expected to occur between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., with spending estimated to reach $15.7 million per minute.
For many retailers, Cyber Monday is a days-long event that spans the weekend from Black Friday—the day after Thanksgiving—through Monday night. This year, Amazon chose to begin its sales event at midnight on Saturday, while Walmart and Target started offering deals on Sunday.
Noting that discounts from Thanksgiving onward have “exceeded expectations,” Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said online Cyber Week spending was on track to surpass $40 billion.
Adobe Analytics reported that Black Friday, usually the biggest in-store shopping day of the year, saw a 10.2 percent jump in online sales—from $9.8 billion to $10.8 billion—from last year as more consumers chose to do their deal hunting from home.
“Black Friday was a good indicator of how the holiday season is positively shaping up,” said Michelle Meyer, chief economist at the Mastercard Economics Institute. “Our real-time insights show that consumers are comfortably in the gift-giving spirit as price reductions and deals occur across sectors, supporting budgets for holiday shopping.”
Consumer confidence in the United States rose to a 16-month high in November—a shift some experts have attributed to optimism over President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
“The increase in the headline likely was driven by euphoria among Republicans,” said Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.
The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index was up by 2.1 points from October. The nonprofit business membership and research organization tracks consumer sentiment with its monthly survey.
The index also jumped in late 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time, Tombs said.
One of Trump’s key campaign promises was to ease the burden of inflation on American families.
While The Conference Board did not attribute the recent increase in consumer sentiment to the election, it did cite improved expectations regarding inflation and the labor market. The nonprofit also said that “write-in responses about politics, including the November elections, surged to above 2020 levels” but noted that they were below 2016 levels.
The National Retail Federation expects 2024 holiday shopping to surpass that of last year both online and in stores, but by a smaller margin than last year’s uptick. The trade association projects total growth to fall to between 2.5 and 3.5 percent from 3.9 percent last year.
