The numbers are slowly coming in, and it looks like the “biggest shopping weekend of the year” is bigger and better than ever! Starting earlier this year on Thanksgiving Day, more items were sold to more people for more dough, giving brick and mortar owners as well as ecommerce sellers many reasons to smile this holiday season.
In honor of Logicblock’s customers and everyone else out there who put in all the work to make the big bucks over the weekend, we thought we’d take a look at some of the numbers and what they mean for you…and the future.
The Numbers
It was yet another record breaking shopping extravaganza this year as shoppers took to the streets and their computers to find great deals. According to CNN, the Black Friday weekend brought in over $52.4 billion, up 16% from 2010’s sales. A record 226 million shoppers handed over their hard earned paychecks, also up from last year.
Most importantly to online sellers, ecommerce was a big part of these sales. According to online data compiler comScore, eretail sales total over $12.5 billion for the season thus far. Black Friday alone saw $816 million, a 26% increase from 2010, making it the heaviest online spending day in history.
Some were concerned brick and mortar stores opening earlier this year would be a detriment to online sales, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, according to the higher numbers, it may have helped, as there was a backlash to stores opening so early. Combine that with the fact websites are available 24/7 and there’s no need to leave the warm house, and digital shopping looks better and better.
The Future
Another big winner this year? Websites that pointed out all the great sales to find on Black Friday and Cyber Monday! According again to comScore, these “deal compilers” experienced surges from 50% to even 130% and up. One site, bfads.net, almost broke the 4,000 unique visitors a day mark. This shows the Black Friday and holiday shopping mania doesn’t just benefit those selling cheap TVs and tshirts.
When it comes to the holidays, it’s all about how much energy you put into your online store or site. Clearly the owners of these deal compilers know that it’s easy to get lost when looking for deals, so they capitalized by putting up those sites. They put in effort the rest of the year and it paid off with extremely high traffic during the weekend.
Other websites have relied on coupons and discounts to drive traffic. For the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales weekend, around 80% of online retailers offered some sort of incentive. These discounts even caught the attention of Time Magazine, who gave a breakdown of some of their favorites. Some stores even had 50%-60% off the entire store!
The lesson here is when it comes to grabbing shoppers for the holidays it may just take a little discount or incentive to get them in. But folks are gravitating that way anyway, so take advantage – make your store as available and accessible as possible, and watch the sales roll in!