Online Sales Boost Thanksgiving and Black Friday Performance

ShopperTrak is still projecting an increase of 2.4 percent in sales at brick-and-mortar stores for the full holiday season.

One survey result is still comparable to last year, and supports the idea that shopping is less concentrated on days with popular names attached: More than 121 million adults will shop on Cyber Monday, and that’s down from 126.9 million last year.

But the 2015 figures underline how American consumers are changing to get their holiday shopping fix – almost 102 million shopped in stores and more than 103 million shopped online this year.

ShopperTrak’s forecast for the holiday season is weaker than that of the National Retail Federation, which has predicted a 3.7 percent sales gain for November and December.

“There’s no way I’m going back there”, she said. He also noted that numerous retail executives he had spoken with were very pleased with the weekend’s performance.

About 77.6 percent polled said they had at least started their holiday shopping. “Unlike ten years ago, we live in a world in which you can shop anywhere at any time”, said NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay in a press release. RetailNext, a company that provides in-store analytics software to retailers, said in-store traffic was flat over the weekend and that sales were down 1.5 percent at bricks-and-mortar outposts.

Seven in 10 (72.6 percent) gave retailers either an “A” or a “B” in terms of how they felt about the promotions over the weekend. The trade group expects about 30 million shopped on Thanksgiving, compared with 99.7 million on Black Friday. The survey found that 41 million, almost 40 percent, said they shopped online on Thanksgiving Day and 75.3 million, or 73.1 percent, shopped online on Black Friday.

It’s been another record year for online retailers, with sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday leaving many of them in the black with total sales of $4.5bn, a jump of 14pc on 2014.

At British stores, Black Friday shopper numbers fell 4 percent year-on-year, according to retail researcher Footfall. Many retailers had offered a higher proportion of promotions online, or preempted in-store offers through earlier deals online which led to a blitz of purchases through phones. Huge retailers including Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart are offering big savings to kick-off Cyber Week and shoppers are gobbling it all up which may lead to the biggest e-commerce day ever!

The NRF’s survey revealed shoppers spent $299.60 on average online or in stores.

Sunday has traditionally been a day of rest…and watching NFL football, but this last weekend, there were plenty of shoppers taking advantage of weekend Black Friday sales or pre-Cyber Monday sales.

The NRF said previous year that consumers spent an average $380.95, but again, that was using different methodology.