Shoppers queued up before stores had opened to get their hands on bargains and retailers reported sales “light years ahead” of previous years. Martin said early promotions in November were a bigger factor hurting Black Friday than store openings on Thanksgiving evening.
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But the drop in sales could also be contributed to actions across the nation to boycott Black Friday sales.
More than half of gift purchasers bought clothing, 32.8 percent bought toys, and 32.8 percent bought consumer electronics.
Nevertheless, the survey seemed to suggest an extension of a pattern seen for several years: As retailer’s deals have spread out over many days – or weeks – shoppers are staggering their visits to malls and are turning to their favorite e-commerce sites for discounts long before Cyber Monday.
But Black Friday, he continued, “is still the biggest sales day of the year and signals the start of the holiday shopping season”. Experts project that weekend sales would be 2% higher than a year ago as more shoppers purchased online. An average of $229.56 was found to have been specifically spent on gifts, which makes up 76.6% of total purchases. That’s a slowdown from last year’s 4.1 percent gain, but above the 2.5 percent average over the past 10 years.
As the Black Friday din settles down, it is time to look back at how various players and products fared and Adobe has offered some insight into just that.
The upshot of this is that the phenomenon of Black Friday as a discrete event is dwindling, being replaced by an extended holiday shopping period that stretches from the end of October to Christmas itself.
Christopher North, managing director of Amazon.co.uk, said: “For the second year straight, customers in the United Kingdom have blown us away with their response”.
While data for Cyber Monday sales won’t be available until tomorrow, early predictions estimate that 126 million people will be covertly shopping from their cubicles during the day of digital deals.
Also, Apple CEO Tim Cook would be happy to know that iPhones and iPads drove the majority of mobile sales, being used for 67pc and 84pc of mobile purchases, respectively.
Shoppers jumped into the holiday sales season, grabbing Black Friday deals and flooding stores all weekend, reported local retailers.
ShopperTrak still expects this year’s overall holiday season to net more for retailers than last year.
A more accurate measure of holiday spending will not be available until the Department of Commerce releases retail spending figures next month for November, and for December in January.
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Both firms said that despite the fall in sales over the two days, the performance must be interpreted as a good one for retail stores because sales held up amid rising competition from online shopping and were better than expected due to pent-up consumer demand and lower gas prices.
