As much as 20% of holiday shopping is expected to be done over the Thanksgiving weekend this year, analysts said.
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Adobe reported on Friday that online sales increased 18 percent to a record $4.45 billion during the combined Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend.
US shoppers no longer blow the bulk of their holiday budgets on the day after Thanksgiving known as Black Friday.
As for how people are buying, the report says, it appears that it offers a good insight into consumer trends, with shopping done through smartphones accounting for 22pc of total sales across the two days, marking a 70pc increase on 2014. The trade group said it overhauled its survey this year, and therefore the results could not be compared accurately with previous years.
Many box stores, including Macy’s, Wal-Mart and Target, are focusing on growing their online business this season.
“I saw a lot of great deals for Black Friday but some of those deals went through the weekend even until Monday”, Wilson said.
Footfall in shops across the United Kingdom over the weekend was down 9.6% year-on-year, according to Springboard.
Mobile shopping was 39.3% of online shopping, up from about a third (34.3%) on Thanksgiving 2014, it says, adding that 78.3% of mobile shopping on Thanksgiving was done on iPhones and iPads with Android accounting for 21.5% of mobile online orders placed.
Sales tumbled 10.3 percent on Black Friday compared with the year before, ShopperTrak reported. That’s on top of more than $1.7-billion spent online on Thanksgiving Day and 2.7-billion on Black Friday, representing an uptick in the double digits for online shopping on both days.
Despite the declines, ShopperTrak is also maintaining its 2.4 percent sales increase for brick-and-mortar retail.
Thinner crowds in stores over Black Friday weekend were also partly attributable to virtual shopping.
Nine years ago, online sales accounted for just below 3 percent of total retail, but since then, the rate of growth has hovered around 15 percent.
The massive sales peaks that used to surround Black Friday have been replaced by calmer, sustained sales over the holiday shopping season. The NRF said that is not comparable to last year’s figure of US$381 due to changes in methodology.
Wal-Mart said that more than 25 million customers had found store maps and its Black Friday circulars online and on mobile, and that tens of millions had “visited our digital and physical aisles”. A big Black Friday sale is also less likely to lure consumers to shops, where they are prone to making impulse purchases. “It has been hugely successful inasmuch as it helps retailers offload old stock and clear the shelves and warehouses in time to replenish for Christmas with newer, higher-priced items”, said James Frost, UK Chief Marketing Officer at Worldpay.
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Simeon Siegel, an analyst at Nomura, said he saw decent crowds at the Westfield Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus, New Jersey, but still expected numerous shoppers to already have made purchases online.
