Black Friday shoppers shift from in store to online

In total, 27 percent of USA adults shopped on Black Friday, up from 24 percent in 2014, and 10 percent shopped on Thanksgiving Day, down from 14 percent a year ago.

As much as anything, the changing way of holiday shopping appears driven by a rise in the number of on-line shoppers, with more consumers now zeroing in on targeted deals via their smartphones, tablets and computers.

“Consumers watch for deals starting in the days before Thanksgiving and they save a bit of their budget to shop the deep discounts offered by their favorite retailers on Cyber Monday”, said Prosper’s Principal Analyst Pam Goodfellow.

The data, without year-over-year comparisons, paints an incomplete picture of the behavior and spending of USA shoppers over the weekend.

The National Retail Federation reported that shoppers spent an average of $200.60 dollars over the weekend, with 76.6 percent of that spent on gifts. More than a quarter said they would wait until early afternoon to indulge in shopping. She estimated sales were up 70 percent at her store, which sells gift items, antiques and other merchandise.

Thinner crowds in stores over Black Friday weekend were also partly attributable to virtual shopping.

“Thanksgiving has established itself as one of the more important online buying days, while Black Friday continues to gain in importance online with each passing year”, Gian Fulgoni, chairman emeritus of research firm ComScore, said in a report on Sunday. A typical mixture of strong winds and heavy rain across the country and memories of last year’s scuffles were likely to have encouraged more Britons to shop online this year.

More than 103 million people shopped online over the four-day weekend, which started Thursday on Thanksgiving and continued with Black Friday, according to an annual survey commissioned by the National Retail Federation.

Sales reportedly feel to $10.4 billion, down from $11.6 billion this time previous year.

NRFs 2015 Thanksgiving weekend survey, including the spending amount, are not comparable to last years survey as the methodology has changed, it says.

The majority of online sales were found to have been conducted on portable devices as well, with smartphone users accounting for almost 45 percent of the total traffic in the online stores.

Online Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales tracked by Adobe Digital Index were $4.47 billion, up 18 percent from a year earlier and higher than its expectation of $4.35 billion.

To be sure, early sales numbers can be unreliable and more accurate measures won’t be available until the U.S. Department of Commerce releases spending figures in the coming weeks.

“I plan on scoping out the deals”, said Diane Boral, 33, from Oxnard, California, who planned to shop online at Walmart, Target and other stores on Monday.

But it said it expects that pent-up consumer demand and low gasoline prices will boost this year’s holiday spending in the U.S.by 3.7 per cent.