Amazon.com (AMZN -1.51%) may have won Cyber Monday, but rivals Wal-Mart (WMT) and Target (TGT -0.53%) also put up impressive showings.
All three retailers were a major part of pushing the online event to $3.07 billion in sales, a 16% increase over 2014 according to data from Adobe. That number was 3.2% higher than the technology company's research arm had predicted.
Cyber Monday was a very successful day but it was not without its glitches, even among its winners.
Target survives near disaster
While the company denied that its website had actually crashed in comments to CNBC, Target did have to put procedures in place to manage the heavy volume.
"As we experience spikes in traffic, our systems place guests in a queue and prompt them to access the site later," Target spokeswoman Jenna Reck told the news site as the problems were occurring.
Saying that's not an outage is like saying a TV network did not go off the air when it has to pull its feed of the Super Bowl and replace it with one of those "technical difficulty" cards. Still, Target said in a press release that it had scored its biggest online sales day ever.
Amazon won in many ways
Amazon has not released sales figures for Cyber Monday but ChannelAdvisor estimated that the retailer not only was the biggest seller on the big digital day, but that it's sales increased 21.1% over last year. The online retailer did make a point of announcing that it sold more than three times the number of its own devices over the weekend as it did last year making Kindle Fire, Echo, and Fire TV some of the big winners for the sales period.
Fire TV was a a particular hit with the company claiming that it is the top selling streaming media player in the United States across all retailers with sales on Amazon.com during the holiday weekend (not just Cyber Monday) up more than six times year over year.
Mobile sales are growing
Wal-Mart has also not released any Cyber Monday sales figures and those numbers might be somewhat hard to judge because the company kicked off the Monday event on Sunday. It did, however, make a point of issuing a press release saying that nearly 70% of the traffic to Walmart.com and almost half of its orders were placed on mobile devices, which is "double compared to last year."
That lines up well with one of the big cyber Monday winners, mobile sales. Smartphone plus tablet sales totaled about 55% of total traffic and 35% of Cyber Monday orders, according to ChannelAdvisor.
Adobe's numbers are a little lower than that when it comes to total sales, but it still called the $799 million generated by mobile a sales record.
Star Wars, nothing but Star Wars
Anticipation for Walt Disney's new Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie helped fuel demand for toys from the galaxy that's a long time ago and far far away. Wal-Mart cited Star Wars toys as a big seller in its press release and Adobe noted in a release that Star Wars figures and video game bundles (PS4 Disney Infinity and Battlefront Bundles) and the LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar were among the most-likely to be sold out items. The company also placed LEGO Star Wars among its top-give best-selling toys.
Big TVs are in
Both Target and Wal-Mart mentioned large TVs in their Cyber Monday statements. Wal-Mart noted that 50 inch-55 inch 4K HDTVs were among the products that gained the most in popularity year over year and its rival said that it sold "two 48" Samsung 4K Ultra HD TVs per minute." Amazon did not release any sales figures for televisions, but shows a number of models in its top-50 best sellers in electronics as of Dec. 2.
Barbie is back?
After a number of tough years and concerns that today's kids may not want traditional toys, Mattel's (MAT -0.05%) Barbie was one of the big Cyber Monday and holiday shopping overall winners.
A number of retailers sold out of the Barbie Malibu Dream House, an item that made Adobe's top-five toys list. The old-school toy was sold for under $100 by retailers including Toys R Us, down from its full retail of $200 (though it commonly sells for around $167).