Shoppers flood online for cyber bargains

ONLINE SHOPPERS went bargain crazy over the weekend, said early Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales estimates.

The sales spectacular started on Friday and carried on through the weekend according to data from IBM and Comscore.

IBM's Smarter Commerce analytics service found that online firms saw a 24.3 per cent growth in Black Friday retail activity and that spending was up 39.3 per cent over the same period last year.

Research firm Comscore said that around 50 million users went shopping online in the US on Black Friday and spent $816m in just 24 hours.

"Despite some analysts' predictions that the flurry of brick-and-mortar retailers opening their doors early for Black Friday would pull dollars from online retail, we still saw a banner day for e-commerce with more than $800 million in spending," said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of Comscore.

"With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it is clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels."

The bricks and mortar scene was less civilised, judging by accounts, and alledgedly one shopper took a tip from the police and used pepper spray in a melee at a Wal-Mart. It is perhaps behaviour like that that pushed so many people online, despite the threat of overcrowding there too.

At Ebuyer the rush of shoppers looking to pick up bargains was somewhat overwhelming and the firm's Twitter account revealed how quickly Cyber Monday turned sour behind its walls.

"Hi all - we've been overwhelmed by the response to this sale; working on getting this page live as quickly as possible, thanks for your patience," says a message posted around 24 hours ago and just a few hours into the Cyber Monday sales rush that saw a host of items selling for just £1.

Later, in response to messages of frustration from users locked out of its web pages, including some that suggested Ebuyer had launched a denial of service attack against itself, it added, "we were expecting increased traffic with this promotion & we understand where you're coming from - we are working to sort".

Other messages from Ebuyer explained that although it had prepared for increased traffic it had not expected quite the volume that it got. "We were expecting more traffic, but were overwhelmed by the level we received & will learn from experience!" it added. µ