Despite reports of an inventory glut and aggressive marketing just after Halloween, retailers didn’t budge much on prices over the Thanksgiving-Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping weekend, this research shows.
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Needless to say that even with the face of Black Friday changing in regard to how consumers shop, where they shop, and how they get the trend setting items and sales items they desire is changing dramatically, it hasn’t changed the importance of the time of year.
The largest metropolitan areas with the highest online sales growth between Thanksgiving and Sunday were Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago and Los Angeles. More retailers have embraced mobile in an effort to engage with their customers, as customer interaction is no longer relegated behind the counter but at any given moment. Smartphones generated 22 percent of online sales, 70 percent more than in 2014. Some 57.7 percent of tablet owners used their device to search for holiday deals and make purchases.
Only 2.19 per cent of visits to websites resulted in a sale, compared with 2.18 per cent previous year. Not only did the sales day beat expectations, but it also set a record for the single biggest day of online sales. Walmart has not done away with Cyber celebrations as yet; Cyber Week deals will be available on its online store till Friday, December 4.
Website outages and slow checkouts during the five-day shopping spree that started on Thanksgiving were reported at luxury retailer Neiman Marcus, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, L Brands Inc’s Victoria Secret and Foot Locker Inc.
The Nomura team also found that conversion rates for all devices increased on Cyber Monday by the highest rate ever recorded. Some of the customers are still getting apology messages from Target which ask them to try shortly.
Cyber Monday has come and gone, and the lesson for retailers is a familiar one: invest in online. Perhaps they know those Black Friday deals aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Online shopping “stole the show”, said Springboard, a firm that tracks digital shoppers on Black Friday. Mobile sales made via an Apple device running the iOS operating system greatly outpaced Google’s Android devices, with iOS garnering $575 million of those sales, and Android, $219 million.
Amazon said last Friday was their busiest in the United Kingdom with more than 7.4m products sold at a rate of about 86 per second.
So the question now is, could Thanksgiving be the new Cyber Monday?
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Physical stores are far from dead, but as online sales take a bigger percentage of retailers’ overall sales, analysts expect fewer stores-and those will operate differently from how they have in the past, especially during the holidays. Physical stores that closed on Thanksgiving saw robust online sales. According to research firm ShopperTrak, sales at retail stores dropped by 10% to $10.4 billion this year, compared to 2014.
