Black Friday Online Sales Up 21%

In the US Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday, was so named because spending would pick up and retailers would begin to turn a profit for the year and move into the black. That represented the heaviest online spending day in history and the first to surpass $2 billion in sales, said the firm, which tracks online sales.

In addition, retailers have been starting to offer significant deals and sales as early as the beginning of November, meaning people don’t have to necessarily get out on Black Friday to snag a good deal.

Many consumers said they prefer to look for bargains online. Overall Black Friday 2015 closed with reach $2.72 billion in total online sales, which is a 14% increase year-over-year.

Some of the decline could be attributed to shoppers researching online and going to stores when they’re ready to buy, Kearns said. But the Thanksgiving Day crowd, when the store opened at 6 a.m., was bigger than the Black Friday turnout.

Chris Christopher, director of consumer economics at consulting firm IHS, said many retailers’ warehouses and store shelves were overstocked heading into the fall.

Wamli, an online home design store, made a decision to roll out its Cyber Monday deals early, offering discounts of up to 70 per cent off for all of the products on the site from Sunday.

Discounts averaging 26 percent off were driving higher sales this year, Adobe said, and average online purchases rose 5 percent from last year to $162.

With many shoppers having received their last pay packet before Christmas, retailers are hoping the promotions will kickstart festive trading after a weak November.

Meanwhile, the owner of Harley’s Fine Menswear said the cold, wet weather was not helping their holiday weekend sales. People who don’t follow the economy closely likely don’t know that an increase in online sales is quite unlikely to offset a decrease in brick-and-mortar store sales. “Simply put, the consumer is becoming much more savvy and sophisticated, reducing the need to wait in-line”, said Chen. Target, Wal-Mart, Toys R Us and J.C. Penney all said they were pleased with traffic both at the stores and online for the official start of the holiday season.

“Sales today have been equal to last year’s sales”, Brian Thedford, general manager of Don’s TV and Appliance, said. And the whole holiday hoopla associated with the long Thanksgiving-Black Friday weekend now seems more appropriate for an earlier era.

If you want to get serious about comparing prices on Cyber Monday, then you can find a host of tracker websites and browser extensions to help.

ShopperTrak is the leading global provider of location-based analytics, providing insights into consumer behavior, enabling their clients to better understand their customers and enhance the shopping experience to increase traffic, conversion and transaction size.

“Over half of a new product’s sales generally come in the fourth quarter”, DuBravac said. But the more common explanation is that it points to profits being “in the black” as retailers bank on year-end sales for a large part of their annual profits.