While there are still some Cyber Week deals to consider, Black Friday has already come to an end. And a new trend is becoming clear – online shopping is becoming increasingly popular while at the same time, Black Friday sales are dropping.
Sales at brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday and on Thanksgiving night rose to $12.3 billion or 2.3% increase from the same period last year, according to a report from Chicago researcher ShopperTrak. It also predicts that the sales for the entire holiday season, November and December together, will rise only 2.4% which is the smallest gain since the recession. However, with earlier sales this year, the focus was removed from just one day for shopping. The numbers show that sales on Black Friday only fell 13.2% from the previous year, with foot traffic down 11.4%. During the weekend, shoppers spent around $22.2 billion, compared to $22 billion in 2012.
Last Sunday, the U.S. National Retail Federation reported a record number of people shopping across the U.S. during the four days of the Thanksgiving holiday. But the amount of money spent in-store dropped – Americans had spent 2.9% less! Shoppers really responded to earlier promotions and sales this year, but some of them are probably waiting longer to do their holiday shopping.
However, online sales rose 21% between Thursday and Cyber Monday, says data from comScore. And this doesn’t even include purchases made using mobile devices. On the biggest day for e-commerce, Cyber Monday, sales rose 18.4%, reaching $1.735 billion, which is a record number for a single day. In comparison, online sales on Black Friday reached $1.198 billion. These numbers prove that Cyber Monday has become the heaviest online shopping day in history. And the biggest gains were for e-commerce leaders like Amazon.com and eBay, according to another survey from ChannelAdvisor, which is a provider of specialized trading software to retailers that tracks online sales. During Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales on both websites rose 30%. IBM on the other hand announced that online sales rose 20% on Thanksgiving from last year and 19% on Black Friday. And sales through mobile devices rose 55%, which is another all-time record.
Black Friday is becoming less popular every year with deals that can be no match for those we see on the Internet. Early numbers say that online sales on Cyber Monday were 31.5% more than online sales during Black Friday. Another huge setback was the large number of incidents in stores. It seems in-store holiday shopping is less attractive for many customers and many experts believe that the busiest period for sales will be in fact the last week before Christmas.
