Of those who shopped in stores over the weekend, approximately 72.8 to 74.2 million shoppers said they shopped on Black Friday, the biggest day of the weekend; another 34 percent, 34.6 million, reported shopping on Thanksgiving Day, and 45.9 percent, or 46.8 million, shopped on Saturday, which is designated Small Business Saturday.
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Like Tracy, many USA shoppers like to make purchases on their desktops and smartphones nowadays, they insist on getting big discounts whenever they shop, and they don’t feel pressured to shop on particular days. Adobe, which measures online transactions at the top 100 US retailers, said online sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday set a record, at $4.47 billion, up 18 percent from past year.
Black Friday deals can still pull in shoppers-both online and in stores.
Online sales jumped 14.3 percent on Friday compared with a year ago, according to Adobe.
She added: “In addition, the growth of click and collect in supporting store visits should not be under-estimated, particularly for retail parks, with many shoppers now opting to buy online but to then visit stores to pick up their purchases”.
That’s up from the group’s mid-November survey, which projected 136 million people planned to shop over the long weekend.
Jeff Simpson, a principal at Deloitte, also said doorbusters – fat discounts on hot items that once drew shoppers in for store openings – are losing their “umph”.
However, consumers showed last week that they are still interested in buying iPads: at least if they’re on sale.
The United States holiday shopping season started in earnest on Thanksgiving weekend, which ran from Thursday, Nov. 26 to Sunday, Nov. 30 and includes Black Friday, which often ranks as the busiest shopping day of the year.
Overall, in the U.S. $4.45bn was spent online over Black Friday weekend while in the United Kingdom it’s expected that sales smashed through the £1.07bn barrier, up 32 per cent on 2014. The trade group said it changed the methodology this year of its annual, so figures could not be compared fairly with last year’s results. Online sales have become a critical component for retailers, especially during high-volume periods like Black Friday. RetailNext, a company that provides in-store analytics software to retailers, said in-store traffic was flat over the weekend and that sales were down 1.5 percent at bricks-and-mortar outposts. But on average, tablet shoppers spent more.
More people went shopping online than in retail stores over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, according to a survey from the National Retail Federation.
Thinner crowds in stores over Black Friday weekend were also partly attributable to virtual shopping. This year, the NRF is forecasting sales growth of 3.7 percent, down from 4.1 percent in 2014, a deceleration it has attributed to slow job creation and household income growth.
The decline, reported by research firm ShopperTrak, reflects the rising prevalence of online shopping.
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The weekend of Thanksgiving is now “almost the second quarter going on halftime” for the holiday season, said Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation.
