Holiday shopping season is six days shorter this year, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday shine a bright forecast on the coming weeks. This year's Cyber Monday was the biggest U.S. sales day to date, and the notoriously-quiet Amazon confirmed that Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in company history.

A few more standout stats below.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday by the numbers: 

From Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, 190 million Americans went shopping. Here's how it breaks down: 

• Go big. Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day in the United States so far. With over $9.4 billion in online sales, that's a 17% increase year over year. 
• Stay home. Black Friday foot traffic declined about 6% since last year, the weakest result since 2014. 66 million U.S. consumers opted to shop online only.
• Phone it in. $3B+ products were purchased via smartphone, accounting for 1/3 of all sales.
• Ka-ching. At the peak of Cyber Monday, consumers were spending $12 million per minute. 
• After hours. Nearly 1/3 of Cyber Monday's sales happened between 10 pm and 2 am. 
• App attraction. Walmart’s app reached #1 among all shopping in the U.S. after peaking on Thanksgiving as #6.
• Most wanted. The most-purchased items were Frozen 2 Toys, L.O.L Surprise Dolls, NERF products, Madden 20, Nintendo Switch, Jedi Fallen Order, Samsung TVs, Fire TV, Airpods and Air Fryers. 

Sources: NRF, Adobe Analytics, TechCrunch

📺 What exactly is "shoppable video"? Maggie Zhang of Dentsu's Video Innovation Council discusses emerging video formats that are changing the way audiences watch and shop.

🍎 Amazon announced that they are opening a second, more budget-friendly grocery chain separate from Whole Foods in 2020.

📝 This blog post from iProspect talks about adding Ad Groups to Amazon Marketing Services will help media teams be cleaner and more creative with their campaigns.

🏆 Big congrats to our friends at Merkle for winning ExchangeWire's Best Marketing Technology Solution for their Amazon performance based bidding platform Bidazon!

From around the web: 

• Amazon released their "Best of Prime 2019" with stats about shopping, music, and entertainment as well as improvements and accolades . My favorite tidbit? The fastest delivery of the year was a cold bottle of Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc, which arrived in only 13 minutes. 
• The endless shelf might be on its way to brick and mortar. Adweek reports that Amazon is reviving the Dash buttons as a smart shelf restocking device for businesses.
• Amazon is partnering with Verizon and others to launch WaveLength, a service that uses 5G networks to transfer data from the cloud at faster speeds.

Interested in learning more? Reach out. 

Sellwin launched in April 2019 as the center of Amazon expertise at Dentsu. Our team works closely with Dentsu agencies, established outside tech partners, and representatives at Amazon to stay on top of best practices and new developments to the online marketplace.