While we were impressed with Black Friday’s online sales, we were blown away by the revenues generated the following Monday. The biggest Cyber Monday on record saw exceptionally strong sales, with revenues topping $1.465 Billion – up 17 percent from last year and exceeding Black Friday sales. The weekend between the two big shopping days was also hot – bringing in over $1.1 Billion from weekend shoppers.

As with Black Friday, Cyber Monday also saw a huge focus on mobile – as shoppers pulled out their phones and tablets to aid their shopping. Cyber Monday saw an increase in purchases from iPhones over other smartphones or the iPad. These statistics from TabletCrunch show updated mobile numbers based on Cyber Monday sales.

• Mobile Traffic: 22.4 percent of consumers use a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site
• Mobile Shopping: 12 percent of consumers use their mobile device to make a purchase
• The Multi-Screen shopper: The iPhone is driving more retail shopping than any other device with traffic reaching 8.7 percent versus 7.2 percent and 6.3 percent for iPad and Android respectively

Much of the increase around the holidays this year was based around early discounts and deals specifically targeted to online shoppers. Shoppers are increasingly turning to online shopping for around-the-clock shopping convenience, lack of crowds, easy price comparisons and free shipping offers.

As online retail continues to grow, the space is becoming more competitive and finding ways to set your eCommerce site apart from others is essential. Luckily the steps to doing so are not as hard as you’d think – there are simple ways to improve your site that yield great returns. We’ve highlighted a lot of these in previous blogs.

We experienced the impact of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush from our clients firsthand, as we saw huge spikes in traffic on our clients’ websites – they more than doubled on Black Friday and increased by 50 percent on Cyber Monday. Interestingly, some of our data shows that Black Friday traffic was helped by shoppers in Brazil, who also jumped online to take advantage of holiday sales.

These major shopping events remind us how our work can mean the difference between a sale and a loss. We provide our clients with peace of mind that our service won’t go down during peak holiday traffic – our servers are “over-optimized” to handle massive spikes in search traffic, as well as natural disasters and other unforeseen issues.

As shoppers become more savvy and continue to reach for their laptop or mobile device from around the globe when they want to make a purchase, make sure you’re in the best possible position to lead customers to the products they want.