‘Black Friday’ losing ground to ‘cyber anyday’ for holiday shopping, numbers show

Among online shoppers, 41 million people surfed for bargains on Thanksgiving Day, while 75.3 million shopped on the Internet on Black Friday.

Two of the year’s biggest shopping days, Thanksgiving and Black Friday, saw big sales coming from online, about $4.5 billion, with about a third of that on mobile, according to a report by TechCrunch using Adobe Marketing data that tracks 4,500 sites. Anecdotal evidence suggests that consumers shifted their purchases from physical stores to websites. Many retailers chose to list their Black Friday deals as early as Thursday morning this year, giving people a chance to save from the comfort of their own homes. Online sales have become a critical component for retailers, especially during high-volume periods like Black Friday. That’s on top of more than $1.7-billion spent online on Thanksgiving Day and 2.7-billion on Black Friday, representing an uptick in the double digits for online shopping on both days.

And shoppers have more information about deals than ever.

-Reuters contributed to this article.

But this year’s sales data show it was mostly a dud. 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.

“Millennials have changed the game when it comes to Thanksgiving weekend shopping, making sure they were out early and often over the entire weekend in order to tackle their gift lists as well as their self-gifting lists”, continued Goodfellow.

According to the National Retail Foundation, 136 million people were expected to shop over the four day Thanksgiving weekend but today, they say there could be close to 185 million people who will shop on line on this Cyber Monday. For years, Black Friday has been accompanied by deep discounts and video footage of shoppers literally fighting over merchandise. The retail federation expects an increase of 3.7 percent.

Shoppers are taking advantage of a deluge of sales and promotions to shop when they want, and how they want, he said.

Of those who shopped in stores over the weekend, 72.8 percent – 74.2 million shoppers – said they shopped on Black Friday, the biggest day of the weekend; another 34.6 million (34 percent) said they shopped on Thanksgiving Day and 46.8 million (45.9 percent) shopped on Saturday, the NRF says. It’s also still overshadowedby China’s Singles’ Day, which broke records again this year withsales of 91.2bn yuan ($14.3bn) in a single day from just e-commerce giant Alibaba that’s more than triple the estimated online sales in the US.