Spreading out online purchasing
put a damper on shopping behavior and stores’ businesses.
Jon Abt, co-president and a grandson of the founder of Abt Electronics, said that holiday shopping has been robust and so far overall sales are up 10 percent compared with a year ago. But he thinks Cyber Monday sales will be down at the Glenview, Ill.-based consumer electronics retailer after such robust growth from a year ago, and he worries about how the rest of the season will fare given the new variant.
“There are so many variables,” Abt said. “It’s a little too murky.”
Consumers were expected to spend between $10.2 billion and $11.3 billion on Monday, making it once again the biggest online shopping day of the year, according to Adobe. Still, spending on Cyber Monday could drop from last year’s level of $10.8 billion as Americans are spreading out their purchases more in response to discounting in October by retailers, according to Adobe.
Both Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day online shopping came in below Adobe’s prediction. On Black Friday, online sales reached $8.9 billion, down from the $9 billion in 2020, the second-largest day of the year. On Thanksgiving Day, online sales reached $5.1 billion, even from the year-ago period.
Harley Finkelstein, president of Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify, which has 1.7 million independent brands on its site, said that so far Cyber Monday was off to a strong start.
Sales on his platform were up 21 percent on Black Friday compared with 2020 and more than double compared with 2019. He believes that independent brands will see better percentage sales gains online than big national chains as shoppers gravitate more toward direct-to-consumer labels and look for brands with social conscience. And he says these brands have been able to get the inventory. Among some of the hot items on Shopify are children’s couches from Nugget and luxurious linens from Brooklinen.
Overall, Black Friday store traffic was more robust than last year but was still below pre-pandemic levels as shoppers spread out their buying in response to earlier deals in October and shifted more of their spending online. Sales on Friday were either below or had modest gains compared with prepandemic levels of 2019, according to various spending measures.
Black Friday sales surged 29.8 percent through mid-afternoon, compared with the year-ago period, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks all types of payments, including cash and credit cards. That was above its 20 percent growth forecast for the day. Steve Sadove, senior adviser for Mastercard, says the numbers speak to the “strength of the consumer.” For the Friday through Sunday period, sales rose 14.1 percent compared with the same period in 2020 and were up 5.8 percent compared with 2019, Mastercard reported.
Customer counts soared 60.8 percent on Black Friday compared with a year ago, but were down 26.9 percent on the same day in 2019, according to RetailNext, which analyzes store traffic with monitors and sensors in thousands of stores. Sales rose 46.4 percent on Black Friday but were down 5.1 percent in 2019, according to RetailNext.
Sensormatic, another firm that tracks customer traffic, reported a 47.5 percent surge in traffic on Black Friday compared with a year ago, but that number fell 28.3 percent compared with 2019.