In-store sales declines over Black Friday weekend had many analysts buzzing about the future of brick and mortar.
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Online sales during Cyber Monday are showing signs of being the savior for retailers licking their wounds from weak-in-the-knees Black Friday.
Anecdotally, it appears the Black Friday bonanza is tempering as retailers react to consumers’ changing shopping habits.
More than 151 million people said they shopped either in stores, online or both over the weekend, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF) Thanksgiving Weekend Survey. Many retailers also have struggled to match the online dexterity of Amazon.
The change in methodology made it hard to tell if this is the first year that online shoppers exceeded the offline total.
Imported from the USA like its Black Friday cousin, Cyber Monday is forecast to bring in more than £900m for online retailers – up almost a third on past year.
“This… increase in (online) spend… clearly shows that this date is likely to continue to be a permanent fixture in the online retail calendar in the United Kingdom, despite the lower-than-expected footfall in bricks and mortar stores”, said James Miller, senior retail consultant at Experian Marketing Services. The Chicago-based research firm gathers sales and traffic data from receipt information and devices in stores.
The NRF also didn’t provide a total spending amount, something it included in past surveys. It indicated that approximately 102 million people had said they shopped in store on the Thanksgiving weekend.
Half of those polled (50.4%) said they shopped in stores over the weekend because the deals were too good to pass up; 31.2% said they shopped because it is a tradition, and 25.5% said it provides them with something to do over the holiday weekend. Nevertheless, sales on the online shopping holiday have skyrocketed since its introduction just over a decade ago, and its biggest moments could be yet to come.
Experian’s senior retail consultant, James Miller, added: “Retailers still have more opportunities to reach customers in the run up to Christmas, with Manic Monday on 7 December representing the time when consumers look to order gifts to ensure they receive them before Christmas”.
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Americans were expected to plunk down $3 billion, or 14 percent, more than previous year on single-day digital purchases, according to Adobe Index, which tracks spending at the top 500 USA retailers. This compares to the 136 million, who in a mid-November survey, said they planned to shop over the weekend. The sales figures represent a 24 percent increase in the amount spent on online purchases during the same time period past year.
