Sales online surge but decline at stores
Print Edition
UNITED States shoppers spent slightly less money at bricks-and-mortar stores on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday than across the same two days in 2013, while online sales surged to record highs.
Sales at retail stores totaled about US$12.29 billion on Thursday and Friday, down 0.5 percent from the US$12.35 billion spent last year, according to estimates by ShopperTrak. The research firm stuck by its forecast for November and December sales to increase 3.8 percent.
The data highlight the waning importance of Black Friday, which until a few years ago kicked off the holiday shopping season, as more retailers open their doors on Thanksgiving Day and start discounting earlier in the month.
It also points to the intense price competition among retailers, which have been discounting by 40-70 percent this year compared with 30-50 percent in the recent past, said ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin.
“I think what we are seeing is those early promotions coupled with some pretty deep discounts,” he said. Martin said he had expected a 0.5-1 percent sales gain.
Customer traffic rose 27.3 percent on Thanksgiving Day from a year earlier, reflecting the sharp increase in retailers opening for business on that day. Traffic fell 5.6 percent on Black Friday, ShopperTrak said.
Martin cautioned against taking the two days’ figures as sign of slack holiday demand. He noted that Thanksgiving and Black Friday combined for just 1 percent growth last year, underperforming growth of 3.1 percent during the entire season spanning the months of November and December.
Reflecting the decreased significance of Black Friday, ShopperTrak expects “Super Saturday” on December 20 to rank as the busiest shopping day this year and says seven of the top-10 sales days of the season are still to come.
Separate data underscored the ongoing shift of shopping to online retailers.
Online Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales tracked by Adobe Systems Inc were a record US$1.33 billion and US$2.4 billion, up 25 percent and 24 percent from a year earlier, respectively. Between November 1 and November 28, US$32 billion has been spent online, up 14 percent from 2013, Adobe said.
The proliferation of smartphones has made consumers more likely to shop online, with 29 percent of Thanksgiving sales via mobile devices, up from 21 percent on the same day of last year. Adobe said its findings were based on more than 350 million visits to 4,500 retail websites.
“So much more mobile shopping is happening and that’s part of what’s driving e-commerce activity to new heights every year,” said Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst at Adobe Digital Index.
Several traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers reported strong online growth, a reflection of efforts to compete more aggressively on price with Amazon.com.
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