Shoppers in Boston didn’t need a calendar to know it was Cyber Monday, as retailers lit up their e-mail inboxes beseeching them to join in on what’s usually a boom in online shopping as people return from Thanksgiving to work, and to faster Internet connections than they may enjoy at home.
“Lots of emails – probably about 50 of them,’’ Darlene Brady of Stoneham said as she walked through Quincy Market.
But, just like Black Friday, many shoppers are finding Cyber Monday is losing some of its luster as the deals migrate to a longer range of days and some online retailers promote “Cyber Monday Week” and “10 days of deals” instead.
“Pretty much the same deals I've been seeing on Cyber Monday are the same deals I saw on Black Friday online, so it's been basically the same thing all weekend,’’ said Amelia Chorosz of New Britain, Conn.
Pete Comacchio, visiting from Shelby Township, Mich., said of Cyber Monday: “It’s a good way to get something that's on sale, but it's not going to beat the deal that they got on Black Friday.’’
IBM Watson Trend and ComScore were both predicting U.S. online shoppers would spend 14 percent more this Cyber Monday than last – but that’s a considerably smaller increase than the 25 percent jump in online spending over the weekend.
Target.com’s “15 percent off almost everything” sale did win enough interest that the website crashed, and Target acknowledged it was “metering traffic” to the site while it worked to “restore full functionality.’’
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IBM Watson Trend has found more and more online shopping is going mobile. A total of 17.7 percent of all purchases this past weekend were made on tablets, and even more, 18.6 percent, on smartphones, and smartphone shopping is up 65.7 percent from last year, IBM said.
With videographer Tony Sabato
