The Black Friday online shopping results are in. But first, if you didn’t head to the mall on Black Friday and are wondering what you missed, advertising consultant Chris Matyszczyk’s latest Technically Incorrect column on ZDnet is both informative and entertaining.
The columnist took a drive to his local Best Buy store and found plenty of people shopping for TVs, laptops, speakers, and even “burrowing into the shelving” looking for speakers.
But many people decided to forgo the trip and shop online instead. Adobe Analytics said Black Friday was the second largest online sales day ever at $7.4 billion – last year’s Cyber Monday spending was $7.9 billion.
The Average Order Value (AOV) set a new record for Black Friday (at $168), up 5.9% YoY.
Ecommerce giants (those doing over $1 billion in yearly revenue) have seen a 62% boost in sales this season vs. a 27% increase for smaller retailers.
While small retailers were stronger than large retailers at getting consumers to add products to cart (13% better on mobile and 51% better on desktop), large retailers were 60% better at getting consumers to complete a purchase on a desktop.
Adobe’s retail report is based on the analysis of over 1 trillion visits to retail sites and 55M SKUs, and it measures transactions from 80 of the top 100 U.S. online retailers.
What were shoppers buying? Adobe said among the hottest products on Black Friday this year were the following:
Toys: Frozen 2 Toys, L.O.L Surprise, and Paw Patrol.
Top video games: FIFA 20, Madden 20, and Nintendo Switch.
Top electronics: Apple Laptops, Airpods, and Samsung TVs.
Big retailers were getting attention on social networking sites. Salesforce reported the top five retailers that got the most social callouts across the globe were, in order, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Gamestop, and Best Buy.
Meanwhile ecommerce platform Shopify, which hosts online stores for over 1 million online sellers worldwide, said over 6.1 million consumers in the US made a purchase from a Shopify merchant on Black Friday, 49% higher than last year. (The number of shoppers worldwide on Black Friday was 9.3 million). The average cart price was $87.71.
Sales made by Shopify merchants worldwide on Black Friday totaled over $900 million USD.
Next up is tomorrow’s Cyber Monday shopping bonanza. Will winter weather that’s been spreading across the country have a positive or negative impact on Cyber Monday shopping? Stay tuned!
Nice to see fleecebay not on the list.
Great job!!
This isn’t surprising considering how many brawls break out over the last whatever (oops, we forgot to mention only 3 per store), fighting over parking spaces and just plain being trampled by crowds.
Camping out on the sidewalk overnight isn’t necessary (was it ever, seriously) anymore with online shopping.
I do miss the Christmas displays with stores going all out. Now the budgets only stretches to extra security, I guess. If I want to see the antics of my fellow humanoids on Black Friday, I’ll wait for the highlights to show up on YouTube or Live PD.
Yes, I have become cynical.
I’m not surprised eBay wasn’t mentioned. Without a doubt the worst Thanksgiving in a decade.
Some years ago, my sister and I went shopping on Black Friday. We were at Wal-Mart, where we had been the week before, and noticed that many of the things we wanted were NOT on sale (mainly clothing) and actually cost more than they did the week before. They even tried to charge me full price for something that was listed in their sale papers at a discount.
We ended up spending a lot more than we expected and we really didn’t get that much. So, we made the decision then that we would never again do Black Friday, and we haven’t. We’re not going to camp out to get that ONE TV they have on the shelf, especially not after watching WM employees clearing the shelves of all the discounted electronics they weren’t going to sell at a discount.
Black Friday is a ripoff.