Online results of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday holiday shopping daze

By Dian Vujovich

If the online shopping habits of late last month are any indication,  retailers might be close to enjoying a sleigh full of  holiday sales receipts to bring in some big numbers for the last quarter of 2012.

I don’t know about you but my email was filled with great shopping deals available online before Thanksgiving— and they continue to come.

But just as it’s almost impossible to pick the top or the bottom of the market, it’s equally as tough to try to figure out when the best deals are or will be available on whatever it is you’d like to buy. So I do my online buying when I want. Which apparently is what a lot of other people do too.

The Financial Services Roundtable is out with a list  titled with tallies of this year’s online sales titled “Fast Facts: Online Holiday Shopping”. What follows are some Fast Fact figures regarding how much was spent in between enjoying your turkey meal and the football games on Thanksgiving and  and that coffee break spending done  on Cyber Monday:

-Fact: Cyber Monday was the heaviest online spending day in history. Sales reached $1.46 billion, up 17 percent over  a year ago, according to the research firm comScore.

-Fact: Online Black Friday sales topped $1 billion for the first time ever as sales reached $1.04 billion—that’s a 26 percent increase over Black Friday 2011, according to comScore. Foot traffic in retail stores on Black Friday was down 1.8 percent from the same day last year, according to ShopperTrak.

-Fact: Thanksgiving Day online sales totaled $633 million. That’s up 32 percent over last year, according to comScore.

-Fact: IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that 28 percent of consumers used mobile devices to shop this year compared with 18 percent in 2011.

Perhaps the most important FACT is this one:” Consumers should protect themselves from financial fraud while shopping online. ”

How to do that? According to The Financial Services Roundtable, one way is to change your password regularly: “The best passwords are long — a minimum of eight characters — and complex, not your birthday or the name of a child or pet. Use a combination of numbers, symbols and letters — something meaningful to you, such as an acronym or batting averages, but not easily guessed.”

Also the site wares buyers beware of phishing scams, to install firewall and anti-spyware software in your computer and make sure your browser and operating system include the latest security updates.

If there is a bottom line to the growing popularity of holiday online shopping it’s this: If you’re a retailer who has not yet established an online presence to sell the wares from your store, you’re losing money.

Read more about The Roundtable Fast Facts at: http://www.roundtableresearch.org/