Digital Marketing

RESTON, Va. — Retailers who promoted their online presence as a way to avoid the crowds this past weekend were rewarded for their efforts with record sales on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.

Retailers who promoted their online presence as a way to avoid the crowds this past weekend were rewarded for their efforts with record sales on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday.

Holiday shoppers were hunting for big screen televisions, LeapFrogs, Angry Birds and anything with an “i” in its name this weekend, according to an analysis of online search behavior conducted by the price comparison website PriceGrabber.com.

According to the firm’s Holiday Dashboard Report, as of Friday morning the top searched Black Friday products included items in some of the most frequently promoted categories such as electronics and toys. The top searched products, according to PriceGrabber, included the following:

Armonk, N.Y. -- U.S. shoppers took advantage of early sales this holiday driving a 39.3% increase in online Thanksgiving day spending while setting the stage for 24.3% online growth on Black Friday compared with the same period last year, according to the fourth annual IBM Coremetrics Black Friday Benchmark study, which tracks more than a million transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers nationwide.

The combination of earlier than ever opening hours, favorable weather and deal conscious consumers receptive to heightened promotional activity produced record sales over Thanksgiving weekend.

The National Retail Federation said an estimated 226 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Thanksgiving weekend, compared with 212 million last year, and spent an average of $398 per person, compared with $365 last year. Those findings are based on an NRF survey of 3,826 shoppers conducted over the weekend by BIGresearch.

Reston, Va. -- For the first 20 days of November, comScore reported that online spending rose 14% to $9.7 billion. The company forecast that online sales for the full November through December period would increase 15% to a total of $37.6 billion.

New York City -- Heading into the holiday season it was widely expected that online sales would enjoy another year of double-digit growth, and now new data from the online measurement firm comScore confirms those earlier expectations.

New York City -- The third annual Retail Finance Outlook released Tuesday by CIT Group found that 80% of retail executives expect their holiday sales to increase or remain the same as last year. And they are eying social media as a means to drive sales.

Among the notable shopping days this holiday season, more than one-third of executives expect Black Friday sales to increase this year; more than a quarter expect Cyber Monday sales to be up and nearly a quarter expect Super Saturday sales to increase.