Over one of the largest shopping weekends in the year, the twin dangers of recession and inflation loomed large. It’s good to know that online retailers had probably their largest sales yet.
While brick-and-mortar stores also had foot traffic, there weren’t long lines at check outs, giving pause to analysts on just what revenue that shopping experience will generate.
Overall online sales for the day after Thanksgiving — aka “Black Friday,” when retailers are allegedly heading into the black — are expected to top $9 billion, according to Adobe, which tracks sales on retailers’ websites. When the final figures are in, shopping could bring in more than $9Billion.
Following a Thanksgiving Day Online Blitz that saw an estimated $5.29Billion in sales, Black Friday was strong. That’s 2.9% higher year-over-year.
Adobe claims Apple watches, AirPods and smart speakers, televisions and TVs as well as espresso machines, gaming consoles and smart speakers, were very popular products.
The record for mobile shopping was also set this year. 55% off Thanksgiving Day online sales were made via smartphones. The company expects that these sales will account for 53% total Black Friday sales.
The loosening of Covid-19 restrictions encouraged a return back to brick-and mortar.
“People have been shopping today. We’d expected brisk traffic and big sales numbers. We got the brisk traffic, and we’ll soon know if that translated into positive numbers for the retailers,” Katherine Black is a Kearney partner in consumer law. Shopping Dive On Friday night. “In Raleigh, [North Carolina] we visited a wide range of stores (Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Bass Pro Shop) and while all of them had shopper traffic, none of them had early morning lines, or completely full parking lots or long lines.”
Adobe projects that Cyber Week (the five-day period from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday) will see an increase of nearly 3% in online spending. This is almost 3% higher than the 2021 figure. With sales expected to top $11 billion, Monday will be the largest shopping day.