Many retailers had offered a higher proportion of promotions online, or preempted in-store offers through earlier deals online which led to a blitz of purchases through phones.
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Brick-and-mortar Black Friday sales dropped from an estimated $11.6 billion in 2014 to $10.4 billion this year, according to the data.
Amazon says Black Friday 2015 was its biggest sales day ever in the United Kingdom with more than 7.4 million items ordered – a rate of 86 items a second.
Each of these figures is a record in its own right, with the evidence showing that more and more people are purchasing the day before Black Friday, with a 25pc year-on-year increase shown.
Online retailer very.co.uk also reported bumper sales, saying more than half a million users visited its site by 9am, having opened for business midnight.
Average spending per person over the weekend totaled $299, with almost 77 percent of that going toward gifts.
CE plays an even more crucial role online, where 76 percent of all online holiday expenditures go to just 1 percent of product SKUs – and 60 percent of that 1 percent is comprised of tech devices, according to the Adobe Digital Index. Because the forecast is limited to in-store conditions, it does not capture the growing share of sales online.
Thinner crowds in stores over Black Friday weekend were also partly attributable to virtual shopping. That is down from about $381 over the same weekend a year ago, although the NRF said those numbers are not comparable because it changed the survey’s methodology.
It’s a major shift that has made it hard for stores to track and learn from shoppers’ spending habits during the traditional start to the busy holiday shopping season.
Shoppers are taking advantage of a deluge of sales and promotions to shop when they want, and how they want, he said.
“And from our data, we saw greater retail sales generated prior to the Black Friday weekend, which is a result of retailers successfully elongating the holiday season”.
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 percent) said they shopped on Thanksgiving Day and 46.8 million (45.9 percent) shopped on Saturday, the NRF says.
“I plan on scoping out the deals”, said Diane Boral, 33, from Oxnard, California, who planned to shop online at Walmart, Target and other stores on Monday.
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.
