Online Sales Bulldoze Traditional Brick and Mortar Stores on Black Friday

That shift has caused the National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, to overhaul the way it tracks shopper spending and visits during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend – something it’s been doing for more than a decade.

Preliminary data from ShopperTrak showed sales at stores totaled about $12.1 billion on Thursday and Friday. That is significantly less than the $407.02 average reported by the Federation last year, but the organization said this year’s results are based on a new survey and can not be compared to last year’s results. Online sales put total sales ahead of a year ago. The Custora E-Commerce Pulse, which gathers data from more than 200 online retailers, said online sales on Black Friday grew by 16.1 percent, with 36.1 percent of those sales made with mobile phones.

Half of those polled (50.4 percent) said they shopped in stores over the weekend because the deals were too good to pass up; 31.2 percent said they shopped because it is a tradition, and 25.5 percent said it provides them with something to do over the holiday weekend.

This year, that number fell to $1.8 billion. A combined 85 percent of those who shopped did so online or with mobile, compared with 94 percent who shopped in physical stores.

Smartphone and tablet devices served as their own channel for holiday shoppers this year.

The NRF changed its surveying methodology and said the report is not comparable to last year’s numbers. But legions of shoppers still opened their wallets between Thanksgiving and Sunday, according to surveys and other data collected this weekend about the retail industry’s annual frenzy of deals and discounts. One-third of shoppers said all of their purchases over the weekend were driven by promotions, and two in five said they think discounting will increase from now until Christmas Day.

Online shoppers outnumbered their brick-and- mortar counterparts during USA retailers’ pivotal Black Friday weekend, underscoring the challenges facing American malls this holiday season as Amazon.com exerts more pressure. Those under the age of 35 were most likely to shop over the weekend.

Each of these figures is a record in its own right, with the evidence showing that more and more people are purchasing the day before Black Friday, with a 25pc year-on-year increase shown. For October 2015 sales excluding automobiles, gasoline, building materials and food services – the so-called core retail sales figure – rose 0.2 percent from a year earlier. IHS considers the holiday shopping season to include both November and December. And based on previous surveys they conducted this fall, NRF believes many people had begun their holiday shopping long before Thanksgiving Day.

Investing in better apps and mobile shopping sites paid off for retailers this year, IBM said Saturday, and digital sales were up 21.5% from last year.