Mobile accounted for 40% of $4.5bn Black Friday sales
Mobile shopping set new records on Black Friday, according to IBM, accounting for accounting for nearly 60 percent of all online traffic, an increase of 14.8 percent over 2014. Meanwhile, mobile sales tipped 40 percent of all online sales coming from mobile devices, an increase of 23.8 per cent year on year.
Last year’s wide-spread reports of fights in aisles over discounted items and the vast majority of retailers promising that websites had been improved to handle the influx of bargain hunters meant that this Black Friday was already widely tipped to woo online rather high street shoppers.
In the early hours of trading on Friday, UK retailers reported shorter queues at their doors and tills, a feeling supported by Springboard, which tracks shopper numbers. It found that footfall across the UK for the weekend was down 9.6 per cent on the year.
Overall, in the US $4.45bn was spent online over Black Friday weekend while in the UK it’s expected that sales smashed through the £1.07bn barrier, up 32 per cent on 2014.
But the average value of what consumers were buying fell; IBM said that while sales were up, the average spend per order was down to $123.45 from $125.25 a year ago.
Proving its popularity, e-commerce giant Amazon said Black Friday had been its busiest UK day on record with more than 7.4 million items sold. Meanwhile, Very owner Shop Direct also hinted that Friday 27 would be its biggest trading day ever with total transactions up 24 per cent on last year’s Black Friday.