Shopping until you drop may very well become a thing of the past.
Two of the year’s biggest shopping days, Thanksgiving and Black Friday, saw big sales coming from online, about $4.5 billion, with about a third of that on mobile, according to a report by TechCrunch using Adobe Marketing data that tracks 4,500 sites.
IBM Benchmark reported that Black Friday sales were up 20.7 percent over last year with an average basket of $134.45. “Popular items including Apple Watch, Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4, and TVs from Samsung, Sony and LG,” TechCrunch reports.
Cyber Monday? IBM is showing that trends are holding steady. As of now, about 34 percent of online sales are coming from mobile. The average basket size is $140.67.
While the number of folks shopping online is up, they also note that the “average value” of what consumers are buying is falling. A few reasons? It’s easier to compare deals online and several retailers offered Black Friday-like sales going into the epic shopping day online.
Adobe expected this year’s Black Friday online growth to be 19 percent, but it ended up being 14 percent.
As Reuters reports, a National Retail Federation report released yesterday stated that things were pretty much on track as they expected. The NRF reported a 3.7 percent rise this year, “thanks to strong online sales.”
The NRF in a poll this weekend found that “broad conclusions added to other research showing that in-store shopping was about the same as a year ago and that online shopping had jumped, putting total sales ahead of last year.”
The NRF surveyed 4,281 consumers via research firm Prosper Insights and Analytics. People spent, on average over the four-day weekend, about $300. They also found that “almost equal numbers of shoppers visited physical stores and shopped online.”
What ruled when it came to shopping via mobile? Smartphones. The iPhone, in particular, accounted for 67 percent of all smartphone sales on Black Friday, according to Adobe via TechCrunch.
