Black Friday online spending hits record

Black Friday spending online  this year may have reached $7.4 billion this year, data from Adobe suggests.

CNBC’s Mallika Mitra had the news:

Big turkey dinners didn’t slow down shoppers this Thanksgiving.

Shoppers spent $4.2 billion online on Thanksgiving, a 14.5% increase from last year and a record high, according to data released by Adobe Analytics, which monitors the online transactions of 80 of the top 100 web retailers in the U.S.

While this is the first year Thanksgiving spending surpassed $4 billion, it was shy of the $4.4 billion estimate Adobe made late Thursday.

Black Friday online sales are on track to hit $7.4 billion, according to preliminary data, Adobe said. As of 9 a.m. ET, shoppers had already spent $600 million online on Black Friday, a 19.2% increase from last year. That is the most recent data Adobe has reported.

The trend of shoppers moving from visiting brick-and-mortar stores to online shopping was evident on the eve of Black Friday. Crowds were thin at retailers on Thursday evening as U.S. consumers spent more than $2 billion online in the first hours of Thanksgiving shopping.

The AP’s Anne D’Innocenzio and Alexandra Olson noted:

Black Friday enthusiasts woke up before dawn and traveled cross-state to their favorite malls in search of hot deals, kicking off a shortened shopping season that intensified the scramble between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

But the ever-growing popularity of online shopping and holiday discounts that started weeks earlier dampened the frenzy. This year, more people got a head start on gift-hunting, lured by deals from retailers trying to compensate for the shorter season.

The shopping season is the shortest since 2013 because Thanksgiving fell on the last Thursday in November — the latest possible date it could be.

Shoppers up since the wee hours slept in chairs at Nashville’s Opry Mills mall, known for its outlet stores. Outside, deal-seekers were still fighting for parking spots by midmorning.

The National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, baked the shorter season into its forecast, but it says the real drivers will be the job market. It forecasts that holiday sales will rise between 3.8% and 4.2%, an increase from the disappointing 2.1% growth in the November and December 2018 period that came well short of the group’s prediction.

Dalvin Brown from USA Today reported:

Americans spent more money Black Friday shopping in 2019 than ever before.

Both online and in-store sales figures increased over last year as consumers grow more comfortable with shopping on their smartphones and tablets.

Brick and mortar sales were up 4.2% over last year, according to an annual holiday spending report from First Data, now Fiserv, Inc.

The financial technology company also found that shoppers were willing to travel for a discount: A quarter of consumers traveled more than 25 miles to visit a physical store.

The report suggests that electronics, appliances, sporting goods and clothing were the must-have items. Electronics and appliances accounted for $214 per transaction on average, while shoppers spent $101 on sporting goods and $81 on shoes and clothing.

Fiserv says it drew its conclusion after analyzing sales data across more than 1 million brick-and-mortar merchant locations.

Spending via mobile wallets was up 82% compared with 2018, Fiserv found. 

“Despite the evolution in consumer shopping habits, Black Friday remains an important bellwether for the holiday season,” said Devin McGranahan, executive vice president and senior group president at Fiserv. “In 2019, consumers showed their willingness to travel for a good deal, and blended their physical shopping with digital payments via mobile wallets.”

Online shopping pulled in a record $7.2 billion on Friday, according to Salesforce, which tracks online spending. That’s a 14% growth over last year. On Thanksgiving, digital sales in the U.S. rose 17% to $4.1 billion; 65% of all digital orders came through a smartphone.