Charisse Jones

USA TODAY

Cyber Monday, the final lap in the Thanksgiving holiday shopping relay, yielded $3.45 billion in sales, a new online record.

On the day when retailers traditionally roll out a raft of digital deals, Adobe Digital Insights said shoppers spent 12.1% more than Cyber Monday 2015, and 2.6% more than Adobe initially predicted.

“Cyber Monday was one for the history books this year," Tamara Gaffney, Adobe's principal analyst said in a statement. "It’s an incredible milestone, but it’s also incredible that Black Friday inched so close to Cyber Monday this year, generating only $110 million less in online sales."

Mobile shopping continued its surge as an increasingly popular way to browse and buy. Consumers spent $1.07 billion shopping on their tablets and smartphones, 34% more than last year, but $130 million less than what they doled out via mobile device on Black Friday.

Cyber Monday is over, but these deals are still good

The National Retail Federation said that 23% of those shopping on Cyber Monday expected to do their browsing from their mobile gadgets, roughly the same number as in 2015.

The NRF survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, found that 122 million consumers — 1 million more than last year — expected to shop on Cyber Monday. But like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is no longer a one-day affair, with some retailers kicking off their specials as early as Thanksgiving and extending them throughout the following week.

Walmart, for instance, began offering some Cyber Monday discounts at 8 p.m. on Sunday and will offer thousands of additional items each day through Friday. And Amazon, which said it was expecting it’s best Cyber Monday ever after selling more than 2 million toys in the first half of the day alone, will also feature cyber deals all week.

“The competition is who can be first with the deal to snag the sale before someone else does,’’ says Efraim Levy, senior equity analyst at CFRA. “Black Friday, and by extension, the Cyber Monday motif, is a way of branding to say, 'We have special discounts today. Buy it now.'’’

Is Black Friday dead?

But that extended sales period may diminish Cyber Monday’s standing as a singular, blockbuster event, like Black Friday, which is “not as important as it once had been,'' Levy says.

While Cyber Monday was created with online shopping in mind, increasingly that’s becoming the preferred way of browsing throughout the holiday season. More people shopped online between Thanksgiving Day and Sunday than in an actual store, with 43.8% using a smartphone, tablet or computer to peruse clothing, toys or other items, according to the NRF.

In-store traffic meanwhile, saw a drop. ShopperTrak, a retail solutions provider, said preliminary data showed that in-store visits dropped a combined 1% on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, compared to last year. And preliminary data from analytics firm RetailNext showed that in-store net sales plunged 10.4% on Black Friday vs. 2015.