Retailers like Walmart, Target and Amazon have already released their best deals, while some businesses are keeping it a secret until the clock strikes midnight. And they no longer wait for Monday to roll out Cyber Monday deals, either.
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According to a forecast by Adobe’s Digital Index, U.S. online sales on Cyber Monday will reach $3 billion for the first time this year, making it the largest single day for digital sales in history.
Black Friday shopping is shifting from hours spent in line to more time online.
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 to the many great deals on great products that we’ve made available for Black Friday”.
Perhaps most importantly, shopping from home means you can still enjoy Thanksgiving – even if you sneak a peek at your laptop or smartphone during dinner – without fretting that you’ve missed out on some delicious deals.
Of those who shopped in stores over the weekend, 72.8 percent (74.2 million shoppers) said they shopped on Black Friday, the biggest day of the weekend; another 34.6 million (34%) said they shopped on Thanksgiving Day and 46.8 million (45.9%) shopped on Saturday. Americans are starting to see early signs of pay increases, hiring has been solid in the past year, and low gas prices are leaving more money in shoppers’ pockets.
The trade association expects total holiday sales to increase 3.7 percent in November and December from a year earlier. While usually lagging behind online search (free and paid), email marketing was the primary channel for shoppers this year, driving a quarter of all orders.
Gerri Spencer and her daughter Jasmine Hansen were enthusiastic participants in Black Friday shopping this year. Overall, about $1 in every $7 in holiday shopping sales will occur online this year, IHS predicts. It says Thanksgiving Day grossed just shy of $2 billion, while Black Friday pulled in more than $10 billion.
Inside the command center, workers glued to computer monitors and wall-mounted screens could view the lines outside stores to make sure they were orderly, that shoppers seemed happy and that customers were streaming into the stores at the right pace – not too fast, not too slow.
The decline in sales on the traditional busiest shopping day of the year has been blamed on shops opening the day before.
The survey of 4,281 consumers, conducted on November 27 and November 28, showed that shoppers on average spent about $300 over the four-day weekend through Sunday. Their figures don’t include e-commerce.
Thinner crowds in stores over Black Friday weekend were also partly attributable to virtual shopping.
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The so-called Black Friday and Cyber Monday were originally American traditions following Thanksgiving but are now gaining a foothold on this side of the Atlantic. Other retailers, such as Fat Face, are donating a proportion of profits from the sale of full priced goods on Black Friday to charity rather than giving consumers a discount.
