Cyber Monday – How Amazon, Walmart and Target Fared (AMZN, WMT, TGT)

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Cyber Monday is the biggest online shopping day of the year, and this year didn’t disappoint. Monday’s sales were the highest on record, with total revenues cruising to $3.07 billion, up 16% over last year, according to the Adobe (ADBE) Digital Index.

Cyber Monday - How Amazon, Walmart and Target Fared (AMZN, WMT, TGT)The largest U.S. retailers — Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN), Walmart (WMT) and Target (TGT) — had a lot riding on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The fourth quarter is where these guys make their bread and butter, as cutthroat deals and discounting ensue.

Overall, the $3.07 billion haul on Cyber Monday was more than the $3 billion Adobe projected, and 2015 seems to be the year where a few longtime commerce trends are taking hold: Shoppers are ditching brick-and-mortar stores for the convenience of e-commerce, and mobile traffic is bigger than ever.

But where does that fit in the story for AMZN, WMT and TGT stock?

Let’s take a look.

Amazon Is Still King

Unsurprisingly, Amazon, the only retailer of the three that actually originated as an e-commerce platform, stole the show. ChannelAdvisor estimates a 21.1% year-over-year increase in Amazon revenue, which means the Seattle retailer gobbled more share from its rivals as the overall market grew 18%.

AMZN also gained share over the five-day Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping extravaganza, with online sales up an estimated 24.1% year-over-year vs. 20.9% for the industry. The company proudly announced that sales of Amazon Devices soared, more than tripling from 2014 as the Fire tablet, Amazon Fire TV and Amazon Echo all flew off the shelves.

WMT, TGT Play Catch-Up

As for Amazon competitors Walmart and Target, things weren’t quite as rosy. Walmart did shine in one important area, though, as it reported more than 70% of its online traffic originated from mobile devices, and nearly 50% of its online sales over the holiday resulted from mobile. With “Cyber Week” still upon us, WMT could still put up some solid numbers.

This is important simply because consumer spending habits have shifted dramatically away from the physical stores where WMT built its empire. Depending on whose data you trust, in-store sales were down anywhere from 4.7% to 10.4% Black Friday weekend. That’s a blow to big-box powerhouse Target, too.

Speaking of, Target would probably like a mulligan on this online shopping season. While its clever strategy to offer 15% off on everything site-wide attracted loads of traffic, Target’s website actually crashed during peak hours. Crashing during literally some of the most important selling hours of the year definitely dinged revenue, and the resulting PR nightmare can’t be good for the company during the remainder of the season. An unusual amount of out-of-stock items also plagued Target.com.

It’s not the first holiday fiasco for TGT, which in 2013 suffered a massive security breach that affected about 70 million in-store customers shopping during the peak holiday shopping season between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15.

With that being said, the holiday season is made up of more than just one day or one week, and we’ll have to wait until next year for the quarterly figures from these three.

But for now it still looks like AMZN is firing on all cylinders, Walmart is getting better at e-commerce and Target … well, Target still has a ways to go.

As of this writing, John Divine was long AMZN stock. You can follow him on Twitter at @divinebizkid or email him at editor@investorplace.com.

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Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2015/12/cyber-monday-amzn-amazon-stock-tgt-walmart/.

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