Cyber Week shopping preview: 2015 season provides glimpse of what to expect this year

Cyber Week is traditionally the most lucrative seven days of online shopping, and last year was no exception: in 2015, Cyber Week accounted for nearly one-third of revenue generated during the 2015 holiday shopping period. Sales were 42 percent larger than Cyber Week 2014 and three times larger than the average 2015 week.

"We will be watching the importance of Cyber Week this year, as more retailers push their promotions weeks before Black Friday," said Ken Cassar, principal analyst, Slice Intelligence. "As shopping online becomes more habit versus a novelty, combined with expedited shipping that allows for a more extended online shopping season, the importance of Cyber Monday is diminishing."

While the prominence of Cyber Monday and Black Friday may be waning with sales starting earlier in the year, data shows that revenue on both days still increased relative to 2014. Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were both roughly 40 percent larger than the preceding year.

Shoppers purchased the most from the electronics and apparel categories during the 2015 holiday season. Nearly 43 percent of the spending during last year's holidays was on products in theses two categories.

Holiday shoppers aren't simply buying iPhones and leggings, they're also buying groceries online. Grocery is the fastest growing category during the holiday season and was up 43 perecent last year. While grocery orders only accounted for four percent of sales, these purchases constituted the seventh largest holiday category. Toys and games were also up 42 percent in this period–probably due to the popularity of Star Wars.

With a panel of over 4.4 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.