Black Friday, Thanksgiving Day online spending soars
Online spending hit a new record this past Black Friday, surpassing the $3 billion mark for the first time.
According to Adobe, Black Friday online spending surged 21.6% year-over-year to $3.34 billion. Total online spending for both Thanksgiving and Black Friday hit $5.27 billion, reflecting a 17.7% increase over last year.
The influence of mobile was evident this year, as Black Friday drove over $1.2 billion up 33% over last year. Mobile drove the majority of visits to retail websites on Black Friday at 55% (45% coming from smartphones, 10% from tablets), while accounting for 36% of sales (25% smartphones, 11% tablets).
“Shoppers hit the buy button at unprecedented levels as conversion rates were up nearly a full percent across all devices in the evening hours on Black Friday,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst and director, Adobe Digital Insights. “With the full day total coming in at $3.34 billion, Black Friday may have just dethroned Cyber Monday's position as the largest online shopping day of the year.”
In other Black Friday findings:
*The five top selling electronic products were Apple iPads, Samsung 4k TVs, Apple MacBook Air, LG TVs and Microsoft Xbox.
* The highest price drops were seen for tablets (average discount of 25.4%), televisions (23.2%), toys (15.0% ) and computers (11.6%). Video game consoles were sold for higher prices (3.2%) compared to Thanksgiving.
* Retailers saw an increase in sales coming through shopper helper sites like RetailMeNot and CNET (16.5% share of sales), email (17.8%), display (1.2%) and social (0.9%).
* Traffic coming from search ads (38.3%) decreased by 4.3% from holiday averages while direct traffic (25.3%) decreased by 9.6%, although both remained the largest contributors to overall sales.
* Consumers spent $1.93 billion on Thanksgiving Day, 11.5% more than in 2015, with an average order value that was relatively flat at $160, compared to $162 in 2015. Mobile accounted for 57% of visits and 40% of sales ($771 million). Smartphones drove twice as many sales as tablets, at 27% and 13%, respectively.