Cyber Monday shoppers buy Apple Pencil, Watch and AirPods

Americans filled their shopping carts with Apple’s smaller gadgets this Cyber Monday, Adobe reports. They purchased AirPods, Apple Watches, and Apple Pencils, it said, with AirPods being among the top three biggest sellers this season.

U.S. festival of consumerism

Adobe analyzes what U.S. shoppers buy every year during the Black Friday to Cyber Monday festival of consumerism in the U.S. Last week it told us that the iPad and Apple Watch were in demand, and this seems to have continued into Cyber Monday.

The report says that spending was down 1.4% this year, but at the peak hors U.S. consumers spent an astonishing $12 million per minute. So far this season (Nov. 1 to Nov. 29), consumers have spent $109.8B online, growing significantly at 11.9% over last year. It means that 22 days have now exceeded $3B in online spend, a new milestone.

Zooming out, Cyber Monday’s online spending was driven by the following categories: toys (sales up by nearly 11x pre-season levels in Sept. 2021), gift cards (up by 7x), books (up by 7x), video games (up by 6x), and baby/toddler products (up by 6x). In the appliance category (up by 5.6x overall) microwave ovens and small kitchen appliances topped the list (up by 9.6x and 7.1x, respectively).

Weaker discounts, stock shortages and BNPL

Adobe noticed a couple of other details that may be of interest: Discounts were much weaker than last year, while out-of-stock messages were up 8% on last year. The latter may reflect ongoing supply chain challenges.

In other news, Buy Now Pay Later purchases increased 21%. That’s something that may be promising for Apple, given recent claims the company may offer BNPL deals via Apple Card and/or Apple Pay.

Interestingly, zmartphones accounted for just 39.7% of online sales (vs desktop), up 8.4% YoY.

“For years, the trajectory showed that mobile was on a course to surpass the 50% mark in share of online sales, which has since been derailed,” said Adobe. “With many consumers working from home, smartphones are losing some of its potential as a major shopping channel.”

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