Consumers spent half a billion dollars online for Cyber Monday by 10 a.m. EST, and total sales are expected to reach a record-breaking $3 billion, according to marketing firm Adobe Digital Index.
The figure comes on top of the $8 billion worth of merchandise sold online between Thanksgiving and Sunday, an increase of more than a billion dollars from last year.
Adobe bases its research on data from 5,000 companies worldwide. The company noted on Twitter that Thanksgiving weekend sales were up 17 percent and that Cyber Monday sales were up 14 percent as of this morning.
As Reuters reported, numerous websites have reported outages or slow checkouts since Thanksgiving, including PayPal, Neiman Marcus and Wal-Mart. High traffic even caused Target's website to briefly crash on Monday.
Around a third of online sales came from smartphones or tablets, Adobe noted. Even on Black Friday, flipping through pages on a tablet proved more popular than getting flipped off as you try to navigate the mall parking lot: as mobile commerce platform Branding Brand reported, a fifth of total online revenue on Black Friday came from smartphone shoppers.
Mobile visits peaked at 9 a.m. in each time zone across the U.S., noted Branding Brand, which analyzed over 10 million visits to 50 U.S. retail websites. The share of revenue that comes from mobile shopping is up 46 percent from last year.