The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Mobile Technology Adobe

Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day break online sales record, Adobe data reveals

Author

By Laurie Fullerton, Freelance Writer

November 28, 2016 | 3 min read

Adobe has released its 2016 online shopping data for Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day and found more than $5bn ($5.27 billion) spent online by the end of Black Friday, a 17.7% increase year-over-year (YoY).

With a whopping $1.2bn spent via mobile devices; top selling products included Apple iPads, Samsung 4K TVs and Lego Creator Sets. Black Friday set a new record by surpassing the three-billion-dollar mark for the first time at $3.34bn (21.6% growth YoY) while Thanksgiving accounted for the remaining $1.93bn.

Black Friday became the first day in retail history to drive over one billion dollars in mobile revenue at $1.2bn, a 33% growth YoY.

Online shopping surpasses all records on Black Friday

With ten million more Americans shopping online during Black Friday this year, according to a Fortune article, mobile is driving the majority of visits to retail websites on Black Friday at 55% (45% coming from smartphones, 10% from tablets), while accounting for 36% of sales (25% smartphones, 11% tablets). Large retailers have seen twice the growth in online sales compared to small retailers since the beginning of the season. Retailers that have invested in mobile, email and social have seen 30 % more sales on average and 25% higher average order values.

Retailers saw an increase in sales coming through shopper helper sites like RetailMeNot and Cnet (16.5% share of sales), email (17.8%), display (1.2%) and social (0.9%). Traffic coming from search ads (38.3%) decreased by 4.3% from holiday averages while direct traffic (25.3%) decreased by 9.6%, although both remained the largest contributors to overall sales.

“Shoppers hit the buy button at unprecedented levels as conversion rates were up nearly a full percent across all devices in the evening hours on Black Friday,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst and director, Adobe Digital Insights. “With the full day total coming in at $3.34bn, Black Friday may have just dethroned Cyber Monday's position as the largest online shopping day of the year. Shoppers are still buying at higher than expected levels in the early morning hours of Small Business Saturday.”

Thanksgiving Day: Consumers spent $1.93bn, 11.5 percent more than in 2015, with an average order value that was relatively flat at $160, compared to $162 in 2015. Mobile accounted for 57% of visits and 40% of sales ($771m). Smartphones drove twice as many sales as tablets, at 27% and 13%, respectively.

Adobe’s report is based on aggregated and anonymous data from 22.6bn visits to retail websites. Adobe measures 80% of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers, more than any other technology company, and uses its proven predictive model powered by Adobe Sensei to forecast online sales and trends.

Mobile Technology Adobe

More from Mobile

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +