The stats are in for the much-hyped Cyber-Monday and compared to Cyber-Monday in 2005, the Hitwise Retail 100 Index is up 13.3% for yesterday (11/27/06). As we've seen for the fourth year running (as represented in the chart below), Thanksgiving Day remains the peak day for retail traffic in market share of visits.

Comparing Cyber-Monday 2006 to Thanksgiving Day this year, the index was down 33.87% and down 26.29% compared to Black Friday 2006. One of the theories that we've subscribed to as to why Thanksgiving Day continues to be the busiest day for retail traffic in market share of visits is that consumers use the Internet to research Black Friday sales the day before venturing out to bricks and mortar stores.

Indeed, our rankings data reflects that on Thanksgiving Day, Walmart.com and BestBuy.com held the #1 and #2 slot for the Retail 100 Index (the #1 spot is traditionally held by Amazon.com), by Cyber-Monday, Amazon is back in its #1 position. Furthermore, as shown below, on Cyber-Monday six of the top fifteen sites in the Retail 100 Index are online pure-plays versus three on Thanksgiving Day.

In other news, weekly search terms driving traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category indicate that the Nintendo Wii is pulling ahead of Playstation 3, possibly due to the scarcity of Sony's game console.

Note: This post originally appeared on Bill Tancer's blog here. Bill is the General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise. His bio can be viewed here.

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