USA shoppers spend less over holiday weekend amid discounting

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. A survey released Sunday by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics said 122 million shoppers in the United States are expected to shop online. A survey by FatWallet.com found that about a quarter of shoppers plan to buy things for themselves today, an intention with a sharp gender divide: While only 20 percent of women said they plan to do some Cyber Monday shopping for themselves, 30 percent of men said the same.

Yory Wurmser, analyst at the research firm eMarketer, said the new mobile trend is fueled by consumers with bigger, more powerful smartphones, making it easier to view and purchase.

Carmen Cunnyngham of Kansas City, Kansas, was in Denver on Sunday and chose to stop at the mall to pick up a new pair of Ugg boots for her daughter. Black Friday also became the first day in retail history to drive over $1 billion in mobile revenue-it hit $1.2 billion, a 33 percent growth over 2015.

Numerous deals that shoppers found on Thursday, they’ll see again on Cyber Monday.

“People aren’t just using their phones to connect, they’re using it to snag a deal”, says Kerry Reynolds, Head Consumer Marketing, PayPal Canada. Rival Wal-Mart Stores Inc (N:) kept the number of online deals similar to the past four days. To nudge them along on their collective shopping journey, customers were given free McCafé Peppermint Mochas and gift cards to put toward their holiday shopping at malls near the fast-food company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois.

At the same time, Adobe said Cyber Monday social buzz is down 82% from a year ago with 96,449 mentions in 2016 versus 535,810 mentions in 2015. The phrase was coined in 2005 to encourage online buying when people returned to offices where they had high-speed internet connections.

And promotions have changed in response to buying patterns. Instead of door-buster markdowns on a select few products, retailers are shifting to a stream of discounts and alerts during the entire week via email and social media.

Of that figure, mobile shopping in the first ten hours accounted for $205 million, Adobe said.

Further complicating the issue for retailers is the data don’t always show what portion of consumers who spot deals on their mobile devices turn around and purchase the items on a desktop.

At the outset of the holiday season, top retailers, notably Walmart wmt and Target tgt made clear they would fight hard on price, particularly for traffic-generating categories like electronics and toys.