While there were a ton of Black Friday deals to be snagged over the holiday weekend, not everyone made the effort to rush to the stores to get them, according to Mashable.
New data from IBM revealed that online sales for the yearly shopping event have attained new records this year, as mobile traffic has managed to overtake PC traffic for the first time ever.
IBM indicates that customer transaction data taken from Thanksgiving shows that browsing on smartphone and tablet devices accounted for an estimated 52.1 percent of all online traffic. Compared to last year, that’s a whopping 14.3 percent increase over last year’s numbers.
According to comScore, Thanksgiving actually played a tremendous part in this year’s sales, according to numbers from the report. On that day alone, over one billion was spent, a 32 percent increase over the previous year, while Black Friday saw an estimated $1.5 billion spent.
“Mobile has become the new Thanksgiving tradition as consumers find the best deals with their fingers as well as their feet,” Jay Henderson, Director of IBM Smarter Commerce explained. “We saw retailers harness the power of data to engage shoppers, identifying the unique preferences of their customers while quickly capitalizing on online, mobile or in-store trends as they emerged.”
“Thanksgiving and Black Friday both saw exceptionally strong online growth rates as each day surpassed $1 billion in desktop spending,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “The strength we saw in the early online buying rush likely reflects a few things, including overall health in consumer spending, responsiveness to the strong deals being offered online, and perhaps some shoppers opting to stay home on Thanksgiving rather than head out to the stores that opened their doors early.”
Paypal also showed an increase in purchases made, since it was a preferred payment method over traditional credit cards for some consumers. It showed a 43 percent global increase in a number of transactions compared to the previous Thanksgiving from last year.
As far as the top location for Black Friday sales, New York topped the list, with shoppers spending around $122 per order. Meanwhile, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles and Chicago followed closely behind in the top five.
That’s not to say that desktop shopping didn’t play its part though. “When consumers did choose to use their PC or desktop, they spent more with an average order value of $135.33 compared to $116.02 for mobile shoppers,” a difference of 16.6 percent, according to the company.
And you can probably bet that things will get even crazier next year…
