NEW YORK -- The viral pandemic is accelerating a transformation of America's Christmas shopping season.
Few people showed up at the mall this weekend, with millions of pandemic-wary shoppers staying home to shop online.
The result? Overall Christmas shopping sales totals are projected to rise a slight 0.9% in November and December -- and even that modest gain will be attributed to an explosion in online shopping, according to the research firm eMarketer. It expects online sales to jump nearly 36%, while sales at stores fall 4.7%.
The online rush was on display Monday, known as Cyber Monday, a day of sales initially promoted by retailers back in 2005. Once the final numbers are tallied up, this year's Cyber Monday is projected to become the biggest online shopping day in American history.
Black Friday, typically the frenzied kick-off of the Christmas shopping season, was eerily quiet this year. Health officials had warned shoppers to stay home, and stores followed suit by putting their best deals online to discourage crowds.
"This wasn't a Black Friday, it was a bleak Friday in stores," said David Bassuk, global co-head of the retail practice at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. "It is such a stark contrast to past years. The stores were really ghost towns."
Half as many people shopped inside stores this Black Friday as last year, according to retail data company Sensormatic Solutions.
Even with that drop, Black Friday will still likely end up as one of the biggest in-person shopping days in the U.S. this year, said Brian Field, Sensormatic's senior director of global retail consulting. He thinks many people will still shop for the holidays in person, but will choose midweek days when crowds are smaller. Heavier in-store discounts and concerns about lengthy shipping times could also draw shoppers closer to Christmas.
"Black Friday had a lot to lose, but some of it is going to be distributed throughout the holiday season," Field said.
Online was a decidedly different story. Sales hit a record $9 billion on Black Friday -- up a sharp 22% from last year, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks online shopping.
Shoppers had access to weeks of online deals, but many held out for bargains that they could get only on the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Amazon offered 30% off on board games and discounts on many of its gadgets. Target had 40% off Legos and robot vacuums for $75 off.
Cyber Monday is expected to generate as much as $12.7 billion in sales -- a 35% jump from a year ago, according to Adobe Analytics.
A big unknown hanging over the shopping season is this: Will retailers and shippers be able to deliver all those online orders in time for Christmas? Retailers have been warning shoppers to buy early this year, because with far more people shopping online during the pandemic, shippers may become overwhelmed with packages to deliver.
Prolonged delays could send people back into the stores closer to Christmas, if many people eventually decide that's a more reliable way to obtain their gifts on time, said Charlie O'Shea, a retail analyst at Moody's.
Curbside pickup, in which people order online and pick up at a store's parking lot, is becoming a popular option for those who want their gifts right away or who fear that they won't be shipped on time.
Some stores, such as Macy's, are offering curbside pickup for the first time this holiday season. Others are making more space in their parking lots for people to park and pick up orders.
In the weekend after Thanksgiving, curbside pickup rose 67% from a year ago, according to Adobe Analytics.
While retail giants Amazon and Walmart are likely to be the biggest winners this year, smaller businesses that have an online presence are racking up sales, too.
Amazon.com Inc., Walmart Inc., Target Corp., Best Buy Co. and others have been preparing for the 2020 holiday deluge for months. This week will be the ultimate test for their new investments in ramping up delivery capacity.
All that spending in a compressed time means that any service interruptions on Monday -- slow websites, payment processing problems, shopping carts that vanish before checkout -- could be painful for companies.
"Even large retailers could be crippled with the demand," said Mario Ciabarra, chief executive officer at Quantum Metric, which helps online retailers fix website problems. "Every minute counts and every customer counts."
There were already signs that some web stores are struggling to handle the load. Sites for prominent retailers had 39% more errors on Black Friday than they did a year ago, according to Quantum Metric.
Adobe Analytics said online sales at smaller retailers were up 349% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. And at the more than 1 million businesses that use Shopify to build their websites, sales rose 75% from a year ago to $2.4 billion on Black Friday, according to Shopify. The vast majority of Shopify's customers are businesses with 500 or fewer employees.
Some shoppers are purposefully skipping big stores for smaller ones.
Bernadette Vielhaber, a technical writer in Avon, Ohio, says she bought books, T-shirts and other gifts from small businesses online, instead of giving her money to large companies that she feels don't need it, like Amazon.
"I'm trying to be more supportive of people who are struggling to keep their businesses open," she said.
Information for this article was contributed by Joseph Pisani and Dee-Ann Durbin of The Associated Press and Carolina Gonzalez, Jordyn Holman, Yueqi Yang and Spencer Soper of Bloomberg News.
