Thanksgiving online sales surge as American shoppers choose to stay at home

The holiday shopping season commonly starts the day after Thanksgiving, or Black Friday with all the retailers offering attractive discounts.

The WS-J reported Thursday shoppers have already spent $27.2-B between 1 and 23 November, a 4.3% hike over the same frame a year ago.

The company says that early data shows that consumers have already spent $490 million so far and similar to previous years, mobile shopping is also off to strong start as more consumers are purchasing items via their smartphones.

Even with big national pushes from popular retailers such as T.J. Maxx to stay closed on Thanksgiving Day, Denton shoppers still made their way to stores Thursday evening.

All told, shoppers spent $5.27 billion in online purchases on Thursday and Friday, up 17.7 percent from the two-day period previous year, Adobe said.

Have a terrific weekend.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday are gaining on Cyber Monday as bonanzas for online shopping.

For Black Friday, online sales are expected to rise 11.3 percent to $3.05 billion, surpassing $3 billion for the first time. “It’s not about how much money we are making, who is doing what, or who is spending the most”, she said. Retailers that have invested in mobile, email and social have seen 30 percent more sales on average and 25 percent higher average order values.

Shoppers will be competing with hundreds in a single shopping center during “Black Friday” with many of them having learned so many things participating in the shopping sprees previous years.

The boom started on Thanksgiving Day, when Amazon’s mobile sales topped Cyber Monday a year ago. Amazon, Walmart, Target, and eBay all recorded substantially higher mobile traffic and sales.

Adobe said it tracks 80 per cent of all online transactions at the top 100 U.S. retailers.

Slightly more than one-fifth of those planning to shop for gifts on Thanksgiving weekend will be shopping Thursday, about the same as past year, according to an annual survey.

Amazon said Black Friday would surpass a year ago in terms of the number of items ordered on its website.

An investigation by consumer group Which? found half of the products “on offer” in last year’s Black Friday were actually cheaper in the months before or after the event.