More people chose to shop online than in-store this Thanksgiving weekend

Customer traffic remained flat on Thanksgiving Day from a year earlier while traffic fell 1.8 percent on Black Friday, RetailNext said.

Finally, those who went shopping via a desktop PC spent more than billion on Thanksgiving and Black Friday combined, research firm ComScore said Sunday.

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. ComScore reports e-commerce sales were up 9 percent on Thanksgiving Day to hit $1.1. billion and 10 percent on Black Friday to $1.7 billion. With 10.5 million monthly visitors and more than 200 million total page views annually, PlaceWise Media offers shopping centers, retailers and brands real-time access to active shoppers now intending to purchase relevant products and services, as well as unique first-party shopper data to help clients better understand their target shoppers’ intentions and make more informed business decisions.

That could be bad news for brick and mortar stores because online shoppers are more focused, said Ken Dalto, a Metro Detroit retail analyst. If all the ingredients are there for a classic Thanksgiving to happen, yet some people opt to stand in line at 8 p.m., you can not rest the blame on stores like Walmart for opening its doors at 8 p.m. The choice to celebrate this holiday is very much there; we simply now weigh it against a less sentimental alternative.

This year, according to Kearns, shoppers were more conscious of sales, even before they began.

The NRF’s sentiment survey, which are not based on actual retailer’s results, said the number of people shopping exceeded their mid-November survey, when the organization estimated 136 million would shop over Thanksgiving weekend. And the whole holiday hoopla associated with the long Thanksgiving-Black Friday weekend now seems more appropriate for an earlier era. That is down from about $381 over the same weekend past year, although the NRF said those numbers are not comparable because it changed the survey’s methodology.

Average spending per person over the four-day weekend was $299.60 with 77 percent of that going toward gifts, indicating consumers also are buying for themselves.

ShopperTrak, another researcher, said that brick-and-mortar retailers’ sales decreased versus previous year. But on average, tablet shoppers spent more. According to comparison shopping and cash-back site FatWallet, there were just 280 Black Friday TV deals in ads, compared with over 400 Star Wars offers across all merchandise categories.

Meanwhile, the owner of Harley’s Fine Menswear said the cold, wet weather was not helping their holiday weekend sales. “Clothes, clothes I like to touch”, she said.

The company said traffic between midnight and 8am was up by 9% compared to past year.

The decline, reported by research firm ShopperTrak, reflects the rising prevalence of online shopping.

The November-December holiday season is crucial for many retailers because the two months can account for anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of their annual sales.