Online, retailers’ weekend best ever
Cyber Monday on similar track
Online sales soared to record highs over Thanksgiving weekend as more Americans used their smartphones and tablets to shop from home.
More than half of the weekend’s online purchases were placed on mobile devices, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which measures online transactions by the 100 largest U.S. Web retailers. Visits to stores, meanwhile, fell as many retailers offered the same deals online as they did in their stores.
The company added that Cyber Monday was expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history. Shoppers were expected to spend $6.6 billion, up more than 16 percent from a year ago, according to Adobe.
“The holiday shopping weekend was extraordinary for online retailers,” Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, an analyst for market research firm Forrester, said in an email. “Consumer confidence is high and retailers have been aggressive with broad sitewide or category-wide discounts, which have also helped encourage shoppers to open their wallets.”
Sales growth from Thanksgiving through Sunday, she said, topped Forrester’s average Thanksgiving shopping growth estimate of 12 percent. The firm is now forecasting a 16 percent uptick for the holiday weekend.
Overall, Christmas shopping spending is expected to increase as much as 4 percent this year, to $680 billion, according to the National Retail Federation, which will release final results this afternoon.
But analysts say retailers — which rely heavily on the Christmas shopping season — can’t rest easy just yet.
“The bad news: Retailers also face a huge challenge now in shipping all these orders to customers in a timely fashion,” Mulpuru-Kodali said. “The holidays are a time for joy but irritated customers who don’t receive their packages on time are not so joyous.”
Many retailers highlighted their Internet sales. Department store chain Kohl’s said its website had a “record-breaking” Thanksgiving, with nearly 16 million online visits that day, while
rival J.C. Penney said online traffic had increased “double digits” the week of Thanksgiving as consumers used mobile devices to buy diamond jewelry, furniture and refrigerators.
“Traffic peaked on Thanksgiving
Day, with the site receiving more visits than any other day this year,” J.C. Penney said in a Friday blog post.
Amazon.com, the country’s largest online retailer, has yet to report Thanksgiving shopping results, except to say said it sold more than 200,000 toys in the first five hours of Black Friday and that its best-selling items
include Amazon Echo devices, Instant Pot pressure cookers and 23 and Me DNA tests.
Earlier this year, the company said its annual Prime Day in July had surpassed Cyber Monday and Black Friday to become the largest sales day in Amazon history. Amazon.com now accounts for about 43 percent of all online sales, according to estimates from research firm eMarketer. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.)
It hasn’t been smooth sailing for all retailers. Macy’s said it had “system issues” on Friday that led to problems processing credit cards and gift cards in stores around the country. Many shoppers took to social media to voice their frustrations, creating a new set of challenges for the department store company, which has reported 11 consecutive quarters of sales declines.
“The delays we experienced were due to a capacity-related issue that caused some transactions to take longer to process,” the company said in an email on Saturday. “We do not anticipate any additional delays.”
But as online spending hits record highs, fewer Americans are heading to the store. Instore visits on Thanksgiving and Black Friday dropped 1.6 percent from a year ago, according to retail analytics firm ShopperTrak.