The data show a marked shift from the days when paper circulars and “doorbusters” enticed consumers into stores.
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Reports on in-store sales are expected later this weekend.
But Thanksgiving and Black Friday are gaining fast. Online shopping was likely driven by convenience, growing consumer comfort levels and a desire to avoid overflowing stores during the busiest shopping weekend of the year, says Traci Gregorski, vice president of marketing for MarketTrack, a research firm that helps retailers with pricing and advertising strategies.
By 2005, when Ellen Davis coined the term, savvy retailers were already offering discounts, and by 2009 the phenomenon had spread to the United Kingdom, even though we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving and the last Monday in November is just another dreary day. On the other hand, Black Friday is boih online and in stores and deals tend to last around 5 days, with the best deals on the actual day.
Cyber security expert Dave Whitelegg urged shoppers seeking bargains online to be vigilant as hackers were targeting people “all the time”.
Today is Cyber Monday with online sellers expecting £1billion to be splurged.
After chaotic scenes at some stores on Black Friday last year, this year saw much calmer trading as more shoppers chose to hunt for bargains online.
When WalletHub, a personal finance site, compared current prices and expected Black Friday prices this year, it found on the day after Thanksgiving.
The Black Friday from last year’s exhibited long tails of customers brawling in stores. And, as studies of this past weekend show, the importance of online and mobile shopping and mobile shoppers has never been clearer. It’s also still overshadowedby China’s Singles’ Day, which broke records again this year withsales of 91.2bn yuan ($14.3bn) in a single day from just e-commerce giant Alibaba that’s more than triple the estimated online sales in the US. With the decrease in effectiveness of these sales, not to mention the actual physical danger posed by pepper-spraying hordes of shoppers wearing rose-tinted glasses, it has been questioned why Black Friday is a tradition worth continuing. IHS considers the holiday shopping season to include both November and December.
The data, without year-over-year comparisons, paints an incomplete picture of the behavior and spending of USA shoppers over the weekend.
Spencer said she spent a little more than normal this year.
Retail sales are growing at “a steady pace”, said Jack Kleinhenz, chief economist of the National Retail Federation.
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IBM Benchmark reported that Black Friday sales were up 20.7 percent over previous year with an average basket of $134.45. Nearly $6.6 billion in sales were made during that time frame, but the weakest day of the bunch was Sunday, when less than $1 billion in goods were sold. “I think we’ll see that trend with smartwatches this year”, he said.
