Updated at 8:30 a.m. with new retail sales numbers.
Did you use your phone to snag a deal between the football games and Thanksgiving dinner this year? You weren’t alone. New numbers this morning show the trend of mobile shopping continuing to shake up the traditional timeframes of holiday shopping.
U.S. online retail sales approached $2 billion on Thanksgiving Day for the first time, up 15.6 percent from last year, powered in part by a surge in mobile sales. That’s the initial estimate from Adobe, which measures the online sales of major U.S. retailers through its Adobe Marketing Cloud platform.
About 54 percent of overall customer visits and 39 percent of purchases came from mobile devices on Thanksgiving Day, the tech company says.
For Black Friday, Adobe estimates that U.S. online retail sales will top $3 billion for the first time, up 11.3 percent. Adobe projects that Black Friday 2016 will become the first day in retail history to exceed $1 billion in mobile revenue (purchases on phones and tablets).
Amazon is witnessing the overall trend, as well. “Thanksgiving is quickly becoming one of the busiest mobile shopping days on Amazon in the US,” the company said in an email update this morning. “In fact, mobile orders from Amazon customers on Thanksgiving Day exceeded both Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2015.”
The momentum is continuing into today, Black Friday, historically the key day of the year for retailers. Amazon said this morning that the total number of items ordered so far on Black Friday this year is on pace to surpass Black Friday 2015. In another sign of the continued shift to mobile, the company is encouraging customers to set mobile “Watch A Deal” alerts via the Amazon shopping app to get reminders when products go on sale.
Amazon says its Alexa-powered devices, including Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, are among the best-selling items so far today. That’s a positive sign for future sales at the company, which has been making a push to enable mobile shopping beyond smartphones, trying to get more people to order items using the Alexa voice assistant.
Another interesting factoid from Adobe’s research: Average order value on iOS devices was $144 for the day, compared to $119 on Android devices.
