IBM Retail Clients Set Records on Cyber Monday, Turn Customer Demand into Online Holiday Sales Growth

Cyber Monday Becomes a Worldwide Shopping Event - Online Sales Up Nearly 17 Percent

News provided by

Nov 29, 2016, 01:03 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today reported that Cyber Monday has officially turned into a global shopping holiday with consumers taking advantage of online deals being offered by retailers all around the world. Over Cyber Monday, retailers saw online sales increase by 16.7 percent. Cyber Monday caps a five-day shopping period where online sales increased by nearly 9 percent (8.8%) over the same period in 2015.

With a dedicated team of technical experts, IBM ensured that all retail customers large and small were prepared for this surge and that all systems, whether cloud or on premise, remained up and running so they can meet the needs of their customers. Working with IBM's Holiday Readiness team, customers rapidly and securely scaled their online shopping, inventory and order management systems, generated massive amounts of data and successfully processed record numbers of transactions, one as high as 1M in a single day. As a result, IBM clients met the specific needs of each shopper, from the first click to when the item arrived in the hands of the customer.

For example:

On Cyber Monday alone IBM clients sent nearly 500M email notifications to consumers around the world – a one day record high. Mobile push outreach continued its rapid growth and was up 47 percent over 2015.
A large home building and supply retailer saw a 44 percent increase in sales over 2015 and had more than 1.1 million page views per hour during their peak period.
On Thanksgiving and Black Friday alone, a US retail giant received more than 2 million orders and a mid-sized women's apparel company processed more than 565K orders over the holiday shopping week.
Over the holiday shopping period a US retailer generated more than 260 terabytes of data.
A global technology company had more than 9.1M page views on their website per day. A major UK home and general merchandise provider experienced a 50% increase in website traffic this holiday season with a peak of more than 2,300 visits per second.

"Cyber Monday is a global shopping event and great deals appeal to all consumers regardless of where they live," said Harriet Green, general manager, IBM Commerce. "At IBM we recognize that today's retailers must think globally and personalize interactions with every person whether they live around the corner or across the globe. To deliver this one-to-one experience retailers must embrace new innovations such as cognitive technologies delivered as a service with leading security and scalability to ensure the unique needs of every consumer are met."

IBM has made significant investments to infuse cognitive capabilities and SaaS into its highly scalable and secure platform to help clients gain better insights into these high volumes of data and rapidly respond across all parts of the client journey. These investments are driving rapid client adoption as companies look for integrated offerings that fit into any IT environment and that span the entire client journey. Over the last ten months IBM has won nearly 800 new SaaS clients.

IBM powers a full spectrum of cognitive commerce offerings delivered as a service and on premise for more 17,000 companies around the world including 7 of the top 10 companies on the Fortune 500. and companies such as 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Yoox Net-a-Porter, Moosejaw Mountaineering, The North Face, Luxottica, The Works UK, and hhgregg.

For more information visit THINK Marketing

Media Contact
Doug Fraim
IBM Media Relations
617-501-6376
[email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20090416/IBMLOGO

SOURCE IBM