Online shopping spiked over the holiday weekend, as consumers spent big, increasingly via their smartphones. IBM Commerce’s Black Friday Report 2015 found that, for the first time, mobile devices accounted for the majority of online shopping traffic on Black Friday, while Adobe reports that online sales on Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday totaled $11 billion, a 15-percent increase year-over-year and 30 percent of all online sales in November ($39.5 billion).
IBM’s study shows that that mobile traffic accounted for 57.2 percent of all online traffic on Black Friday. In 2014, 49.6 percent of online shopping traffic was attributed to mobile. Mobile’s share of actual sales on Black Friday also rose, climbing from 27.9 percent of online sales in 2014 to 36.2 percent in 2015.
Adobe reports that Thanksgiving Day sales generated the largest average individual consumer expenditure, at $162, followed by Black Friday at $137 and Cyber Monday at $133. Cyber Monday’s sales volume ticked up significantly, however, with $2.98 billion—up 12 percent from 2014—spent by the end of the day, making it the largest online sales day in history.
“Cyber Monday has pushed online spending to a new high and is on track to hit a record $3 billion in sales, in line with our forecast,” says Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for Adobe Digital Index. “Online traffic was so astronomical that several retailers experienced temporary outages and slow checkouts, but that didn’t stall consumer spending. Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago and Los Angeles were the largest metropolitan areas with the highest online sales increases between Thanksgiving and Sunday.”
For IBM Commerce’s Black Friday Report, click here.
To learn more about Adobe’s online shopping data, click here.