Cyber Monday proved to be yet another spendy day in the US. A record $12.4B was spent in online shopping, up 9.4% from 2022, as reported by Adobe Analytics. Across all e-commerce, Adobe reported the biggest daily deals were found in electronics and toys, discounted at 31% and 27%, respectively.

We looked deeper into Cyber Monday deals on Amazon and tracked 50 items across a wide spectrum located in their “Cyber Monday Deals” section. These items ranged from Amazon’s own Kindle and Amazon Basics clothing to Coach handbags, protein bars, and batteries. Our goal was to examine sale price, discount percentage, and the original price. The average Cyber Monday discount across the 50 items tracked was 34%.

We checked the pricing on the same 50 items on Tuesday following Cyber Monday to see if the Cyber Monday deals were as great as advertised and found most products remained on sale at an average discount of 18% compared to 34% on Cyber Monday.

It’s important to note that there are deals on Cyber Monday, but they’re just not as attractive as advertised, because the deals continued after Cyber Monday. The benefit of buying on Cyber Monday only yielded a 16% discount when compared to the still-reduced price on the following day, which is lower than the advertised 34% average Cyber Monday discount.

Going deeper, Tuesday’s pricing dynamic can be segmented into three categories:

1. No change to the discount: 17 of the 50 deals remained unchanged from Monday to Tuesday, which showed no advantage to buying on Cyber Monday.
2. Partial discounting continued: 17 of the 50 deals continued to offer discounts, albeit not as significant as on Cyber Monday.
3. True Cyber Monday discount: 16 of the 50 deals returned to their regular price on Tuesday, offering no discount.

Here’s the data:

Amazon has four major sales events each year. In 2022, Amazon added a second Prime Day, which joined Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the company’s four key sales days.

As expected, each year these events break the previous year’s revenue total. While we believe the biggest day of the year is actually the July Prime Day as Amazon is not competing with other retailers, all four power sale days are important to the company.

We estimate these four events account for about 10% of the company’s annual retail revenue and it comes from just four days of the year.

Amazon and its sellers know the importance of capitalizing on these events. They continue to fine-tune their pricing strategy to create senses of urgency and deal scarcity when, in reality, deals tend to stick around, albeit maybe not at as great of a discount percentage.

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