Online shopping stole the show on Black Friday, with high street stores seemingly deserted during the retail holiday.
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Black Friday sales soared on portable devices.
This year store groups, including household goods retailer Argos and clothing and food retailer Marks & Spencer, stretched Black Friday discounts over several days to smooth demand. This jump in online shopping came from the week of online deals in promotion of yesterday’s Cyber Monday, which was forecasted to be the biggest online shopping day of the year. Overall, about $1 in every $7 in holiday shopping sales will occur online this year, IHS predicts.
As more Black Friday sales have shifted online, millions of shoppers still trekked to their favorite stores on the evening of Gray Thursday, Black Friday over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
ShopperTrak, the leading global provider of consumer behavior insights and location-based analytics, today released its updated sales estimate for brick-and-mortar retail on Black Friday weekend, including November 26 – Nov. 29.
Anecdotally, it appears the Black Friday bonanza is tempering as retailers react to consumers’ changing shopping habits.
Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst, Adobe Digital Index, said, “US consumers have turned into digital shopping ninjas this holiday season as retailers continue to adjust to a huge influx of smartphone shoppers”.
Kearns added that crowds were thinner this year, especially on Thanksgiving Day, due to “backlash against store openings on the holiday”. Shoppers may have been put off by the cold drizzly weather Thanksgiving night or chose to spend time with families instead of hitting the stores, he said. Though fewer in numbers, tablet users have been found to have spent more, averaging at $136 in total purchases, reports CNN Money.
“Looking at the weekend as a whole, there was a different pattern of trade to previous year”, John Lewis said.
Many retailers, both online and in-store, offered bargain hunters deals across the four days and beyond. Best Buy and Target are offering free shipping on all orders through Christmas. Wal-mart, meanwhile, is encouraging e- commerce shoppers to take advantage of in-store pickup, an attempt to leverage its more than 4,600 US locations.
Shoppers spent an average of $299.60, with almost $230 of that going toward gifts, the National Retail Federation survey said.
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More than half of gift purchasers bought clothing, 32.8 percent bought toys, and 32.8 percent bought consumer electronics.
