More Shoppers On US Black Friday Than Last Year

“These nascent devices, including digital assistant devices, virtual reality and drones, landed on the front page of retailer’s Black Friday ads, and shopper’s baskets, for the first time this year”. And we may still get that, but miracles have become scarce and hard to come by these days.

However, many Cyber Monday deals this year were moved back to Black Friday, Doshi added. And it’s not good.

About 154 million shoppers made purchases at stores or on e-commerce sites this holiday weekend, the National Retail Federation reported Sunday, a bump up from the 151 million people who a year ago participated in the annual barrage of Black Friday deals.

Some reasons, Field said, are fewer store openings on Thanksgiving Day and online shopping.

But the standout this holiday weekend was the spike in online shopping, which broke records as shoppers scouted deals on their tablets before heading to the mall, or made a final purchase with the click of a button.

It looks like this years Black Friday sales could have been the highest to date as reports suggest that Black Friday sales for online hit a record $3.34 billion.

Though in-store customer traffic picked up in the afternoon, it paled in comparison to the jump in online sales, NBC news cited analysts as saying.

The estimates released by Adobe underscore a 33 percent year-on-year increase in total mobile sales for Black Friday 2016 as compared to last year.

This includes the online operations of brick-and-mortar retailers. And while it is true that a sale is a sale, pure play retailers like Amazon are more likely to take disproportionate market share over traditional brick and mortar retailers.

But it wasn’t enough.

Store traffic over the holiday shopping weekend was about 2 percent higher compared past year, the National Retail Federation (NRF) said.

Retail gurus pointed at the culprit: discounting. They were discounted at Nordstrom, which is one of her favorite places to shop. About quarter of employees said they shop with both while at work.

So, what were the top selling consumer electronics products over the recent US Thanksgiving holiday period? A nightmare for retailers.

The main differentiator for Cyber Monday, though, is that it is more heavily emphasized on online sales and offers.

And this focus on discounted items depresses dollar sales.

The most popular day to shop online was Black Friday itself, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Even though shoppers are spending less per person, more shoppers could still translate into more spending.

Retail foot traffic over the busy holiday weekend was down from past year, according to the National Retail Federation. So this would indicate that these sales would still happen, but they’d happen later in the season.

That’s a new twist, however. Plenty of Black Friday sales get extended into Cyber Monday.