Post-Cyber Monday Analysis: The Shift to Online and Mobile Shopping Is Real

The holiday shopping season is off to the races with Black Friday and Cyber Monday officially behind us. But now that we’ve all recovered from our turkey-induced comas and the adrenaline rushes that allowed us to haul around 60-inch TVs all by ourselves, where do retailers stand?

The good news is that Cyber Monday rocked the house. Analyst data from comScore Inc. show that this year’s Cyber Monday was a record-breaking success, with the sales up 17 percent year over year, reports Seeking Alpha.

The bad news is that this increase seems to have come at the expense of brick-and-mortar sales. The National Retail Federation released their results for Black Friday weekend which showed sales from Thursday through Sunday fell 11 percent from the year-ago period.

However, the overall holiday forecast remains rosy. The NRF maintains that the shopping season should still see an increase of roughly 4 percent from 2013 when everything’s all said and done and bought.

A Shift to Online and Mobile Shopping

With this growth and the trend favoring online shopping over brick-and-mortar shopping, some are asking if Cyber Monday should be called "the new Black Friday."

But the most interesting thing about this shift isn’t just that e-commerce sales are eclipsing traditional retail sales — it's how much of the Cyber Monday action is taking place on mobile devices.

Walmart.com had a particularly successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with the company claiming this year’s pre- and post-Thanksgiving sales rush has been its most successful ever. A big surprise, though, is that 70 percent of the traffic Walmart.com saw came from mobile devices and not desktop computers, according to TechCrunch.

This data should give retailers who’ve been holding off making their retail experiences mobile friendly a swift kick in the pants to get in gear. The consumers are making their message clear: We will shop with mobile retailers.