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Todd Watson

Back in Black Friday?

Written by Todd Watson
11/30/2009 1 comment
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For those of you in the U.S., I hope you had yourselves a very happy (and long) Thanksgiving weekend.

They're never long enough.

So did anybody out there go and do a little shopping?

It seems that quite a few of you certainly went shopping online.

Me, I beat the rush, heading over to Amazon on Thanksgiving Day to buy a couple of new photography toys.

But it was Black Friday, as we've come to coin the shopping day after Thanksgiving, where things really heated up.

ComScore just released its numbers overnight, and indicated that Black Friday reached $595 million in U.S. online holiday spending, up 11 percent over last year.

For the first 27 days of November, $10.57 billion had been spent online, a 3 percent increase over the corresponding days last year.

For Black Friday deal seekers, it was clear the discount shoppers were out in force, with the number of visitors to coupon sites growing 17 percent over last year, at 3.3 million visitors.

And it was ShopLocal.com that ranked as the most visited comparison shopping site on Black Friday (2 million visitors on Friday), helping turn local Web inquiries into local "brick-and-mortar" sales.

Now for the drum roll... the five top online retail properties surpassed 4 million U.S. unique visitors on Black Friday, with Amazon garnering a 28 percent increase in unique visitors over last year, followed by Wal-Mart (22 percent), Apple.com (39 percent), Target (2 percent), and BestBuy (24 percent).

Overall, a strong start to the holiday shopping season, but as they ask on Broadway, does it have legs?

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet cites discounts and promotions as having led to the early pop, and it's clear that the Amazon vs. Wal-Mart match is proving to be the event of this holiday season.

Of course, it's way too soon to tell who has been naughty, nice, or profitable, and who's simply giving away merchandise online to get customers in and spending.

Santa still has plenty of rounds to make, including today's round of "Cyber Monday," when we worker bees head back to the office corporate networks to shop during our lunch breaks.

But the early holiday online shopping signs at least offer some hope that the kiddies will get more than charcoal this year.
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cjon316
IQ Crew
Monday November 30, 2009 4:37:31 PM
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If you double the sales, at a loss leader price, does the economy make up for it in volume? How is it determined whether or not it means the economy in general is strengthening, or staying static, or worse, in a decline?

It will be interesting to see the economic impact of these increases over last year, and what they mean to the overall economic picture.

 

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