Brick-and-mortar retail stores took a back seat to
online holiday sales during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday shopping period. Some merge them with store sales and some continue to report them as a separate category.
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Shoppers kicked off the holiday 2015 buying season, both in-stores and online, over the Thanksgiving weekend. Shoppers spent more than $10.2 billion on Black Friday, down 11.9 percent, according to ShopperTrak. Some stores began Black Friday promotions in October this year.
“The success of the holiday season doesn’t hinge on the performance of a single day”, he added.
Online retailers are reporting record-breaking sales from the first few hours of the bonanza making it likely that online retail sales in the United Kingdom will surpass £1 billion in one day.
Some industry analysts have questioned whether the season itself is losing significance as retailers increasingly offer sales all year round.
“US consumers have turned into digital shopping ninjas”, Adobe analyst Tamara Gaffney said. Some on Friday morning said they had already shopped online or visited the mall the night before.
While in past years smartphones and tablets were seen as tools to help customers shop around and compare prices before visiting stores (or even while in stores), Adobe found that they are now being used as tools to make purchases online.
That’s a much larger increase than the 3.5 percent gain Christopher forecasts for total holiday retail sales, including both online and in traditional retail stores.
This year, almost 60 percent of consumers started holiday shopping before Thanksgiving, the highest proportion ever reported, according to the National Retail Federation, a trade group.
“Black Friday has become a major event in the United Kingdom retail calendar, but retailers are walking a very fine line”. And many retailers are offering bargains long before Thanksgiving, limiting the impact of Black Friday specials.
Some 37 percent of respondents saw a downturn in sales, she says, while 20.8 percent saw flat sales.
Last year, about 65 percent of 4K TV sales came in the last three months of the year.
Half of those polled (50.4 percent) said they shopped in stores over the weekend because the deals were too good to pass up; 31.2 percent said they shopped because it is a tradition, and 25.5 percent said it provides them with something to do over the holiday weekend.
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The popularity of online shopping did not appear to be matched on the high street and in supermarkets where there were no signs of the huge crowds which gathered on Black Friday previous year, or the scuffles which broke out as customers fought over big-ticket items.
