The 2024 holiday shopping season witnessed record breaking sales in the US and around the world. Sales figures for both online and in-store sales grew as more countries embraced the Cyber five period to kickoff the seasonal holiday shopping.  After studying a flurry of posts from Perfaware’s enterprise software vendors (IBM, Sterling and Kibo), mainstream and Retail media outlets over the last 2 weeks here are my takeways.

Global online spending during Cyber Week reached unprecedented levels, with Salesforce reporting $314.9 billion in global sales and $76 billion in the U.S. What bodes well for Retailers is that they could see modest gains in YoY sales without discounting heavily. Peeking underneath the covers of the “cyber week” or the “Cyber five” (Thanksgiving Thu to CyberMonday) reveal significant developments in consumer behavior and technological advances, offering valuable insights for retailers aiming to enhance their strategies.

Leading OMS systems pass with flying colors

Perfaware’s technology partners – IBM, Salesforce and Kibo – reported successful holiday seasons for their Retailer clients with their digital commerce solutions and OMS in particular scaling well to meet the holiday peaks. While IBM reported handling 42M orderlines and 6+B API calls during Cyberweek for their SaaS clients, Salesforce sustained over 50M orders in this cyber 5 period for its Commerce Cloud solution. Kibo’s Unified Commerce Platform witnessed a YoY growth in transactions of over 11% from the prior year.

Record-Breaking Sales and Mobile Commerce Growth

This period accounted for 23% of all online holiday sales, marking a return to pre-pandemic shopping patterns. An interesting aspect is that: 126 million people shopped in-store (up from 121.4 million last year). And 124.3 million consumers shopped online this year, down from 134.2 million last year.  Mobile devices played a pivotal role, facilitating 70% of online purchases both in the U.S. and globally, underscoring the importance of mobile optimization for retailers. NRF reported

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Driving Sales and Profitability

AI significantly influenced consumer engagement, with $60 billion of global online sales during Cyber Week attributed to AI-driven personalized offers and interactions. Retailers leveraging AI and agents experienced a 2% higher conversion rate compared to those who did not, highlighting the effectiveness of AI in enhancing customer experiences. While Salesforce has been crediting Agentforce and Einstein AI for Commerce Cloud for improved personalization and conversion rates, IBM has announced AI optimized fulfillment decisions and inventory promising during browsing and checkout to improve conversion and profitability. In fact, IBM estimates the number of orderlines optimized for fulfillment by AI to be over 25M.

Not all categories gained equally or were discounted the same way

This year, apparel, beauty, and accessories led the charge in mobile purchases, with apparel sales peaking earlier in the week and beauty peaking late in the week. Electronics were the most marked-down category for the cyber five.

Not all days showed the same traffic patterns

Black Friday was the clear winner for online shoppers count and in-store shoppers. Cyber Monday, just as last year, saw the lowest mobile traffic out of the Cyber Five days, with 59% of visits coming from mobile devices.

Not just an American holiday and shopping phenomenon anymore

This major sale event which started off being limited to the USA has now becoome a global phenomenon with Europe, Asia Pacific including India, adopting this sales event and becoming part of the shopping cycle for customers and brands.

Partnership and preparation that goes beyond just World class software

Retailers who pulled off a successful cyber week do so with months of preparation – both from their side and working closely with their technology vendors and services partners like Perfaware. Our Managed Services clients benefited from our years of expertise in IBM Sterling OMS Suite (Intelligent Promising, Store, Call Center, OMS) , Salesforce Commerce Cloud (B2C, D2C, Order Management and B2B) and Kibo to predict, prevent, and address issues proactively and created recommendations to help achieve peak holiday success. Our Performance Engineering clients had load-tested, scaled and tuned their systems well  ahead of the peak shopping days. The Holiday readiness rooms established by our partners and the real-time monitoring and risk mitigation we partnered on ensured seamless performance and availability during peak traffic periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If you are a Retailer or a Consultant serving Retail clients feel free to drop comments below about what you learnt or saw in the 2024 Cyber week. 

To learn more how Perfaware’s services and solutions for Digital Commerce can help you deliver world class customer experience at scale get in touch.