Sonos meant it when it said on an earnings call this month that it would be less promotional this holiday season than in other years (see 2111180049). Due to supply constraints, “we won't be running typical promotional environments” in the holiday quarter, said Chief Financial Officer Brittany Bagley. We found only three “deals” at Sonos.com on Cyber Monday: a turntable and Sonos Five speaker, $49 off to $949; a pair of Five speakers, cut $49 to $1,049; and a pair of One speakers, $19 lower to $419, for a 4.3% discount. None of the company’s newest products was discounted, including the second-generation Beam we had our eyes on. Best Buy had an open-box version of the $449 Beam for $336; the first-generation Beam it’s replacing was $399 new.

Total online consumer spending topped $22 billion over the big three holiday season shopping days, reported Comscore Friday. Cyber Monday sales rose 24% to $9.81 billion, vs. a 31% increase from 2018 to 2019. Black Friday online sales grew 26% to $7.34 billion, and Thanksgiving sales jumped 26% to $4.94 billion. Mobile’s share of digital spending on Thanksgiving reached 45%, from 40% a year ago; mobile spending on Black Friday was 42% vs. 37%.

Though there was much “pull-forward” tech product demand due to the pandemic, Black Friday/Cyber Monday “is still a massive event in consumer spending,” GoPro CEO Nick Woodman told a virtual Wells Fargo investor conference Tuesday. Those days are “still like a ring of the bell for a large percentage of consumers to say, OK, let’s get out our wallets and start shopping,” he said. As for concerns that consumers “weren’t going to show up” for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, “that myth has been dispelled,” he said. GoPro “got comfortable” with its shift to “being more direct-to-consumer because we had good data,” said Woodman. “We’ve been growing our direct business year over year for quite some time. There have been periods of time where certain regions were low on inventory at retail and we saw enormous spikes in our dot-com business.”

National Retail Federation CEO Matthew Shay will host a media call Tuesday to analyze the results of the five-day holiday shopping period from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday. NRF draws its data from Prosper Insights & Analytics, which also will participate on the call. NRF is forecasting 3.6%-5.2% year-on-year holiday sales increase for Nov.1-Dec. 31, including up to a 30% rise in online and other non-store sales (see 2011230045).

Apple was guilty of “clearly false, deceptive, and misleading marketing and advertising” when it offered Apple Store gift card giveaways over Thanksgiving weekend with the purchase of select iPhones, iPads, iMacs and other products (see 1811230026), alleged a complaint (in Pacer) Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Jose that seeks class-action status. San Francisco resident Jessica Lee accessed the Apple Store app on her iPhone Cyber Monday and bought a MacBook Air after clicking on a link for the Apple Shopping Event promotion that included the gift-card offer, said the complaint, filed three days after the Cyber Monday offer expired. “To this day, Plaintiff has not received the $200 Gift Card offered by Apple in connection with her purchase,” it said. She’s one of “numerous consumers” throughout the U.S. “who were duped into buying one or more Apple products based on false and misleading offers” for gift cards that Apple “had no intention to actually provide,” in violation of California unfair-competition and false-advertising laws, it said. Apple “knew or recklessly disregarded” that products not eligible for the gift-card offer were “represented to consumers as eligible before their purchase,” it said. Apple “intended” that consumers “rely on these representations, as the representations are made prominently on the multiple pages of the Apple Store app and elsewhere,” it said. Apple didn’t comment.

Social media analytics company Talkwalker said Cyber Monday was promoted in the U.S. by more than 1.1 million social media mentions in the past 30 days, with 430,000 coming within a 24-runup to the online shopping day itself. Though it’s a U.S. event, the hashtag #CyberMonday was mentioned “hundreds of thousands” of times in Europe, it said. Amazon led in mentions with more than 90,000, followed by Walmart (20,000), Samsung (14,000), Xbox one (12,000 plus), Google (over 12,000), Nintendo Switch (8,000), plus Sony, new Cyber Monday entrant Alibaba, Android and PlayStation 4, each with over 7,000, it said. It seemed everyone wanted in on the traffic the buying day would bring in. In addition to the usual retail suspects promoting their goods, our Twitter search uncovered a Realtor’s “secret” home in the Dallas area for a CyberMonday price of $799,000 and a #riseupretail post demanding better wages from Walmart for those who make Cyber Monday happen and another post protesting Amazon's impending move to New York City that "will displace existing residents." Internet guardians also used the #Cyber Monday hashtag to warn about safe shopping. The FBI tweeted: "Beware of #CyberMonday scams. If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is." It told users to report "internet crime & #fraud schemes" to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The Digital Citizen Academy tweeted tips for safe Cyber Monday Shopping: shop from a secure computer; shop using a secure connection; use trusted vendors; review credit card and bank statements regularly during the shopping season; and use unique passwords and logon information for every site visited. In 2017, 14 percent of all complaints to the FTC involved identity theft, it said.