Thanksgiving online spend hits a record $3.7B, mobile accounted for one-third of sales

THANKSGIVING, A DAY WHEN brick-and-mortar stores tend to be closed, has become a big one for online spending, and this year did not disappoint, with a surge of consumers rushing to digital platforms to grab sale items while physical stores were closed. This year, US consumers spent a record $3.7 billion on Thanksgiving, according to analysts, with smartphones driving 54.4 percent of traffic to retail sites and 36.7 percent of all e-commerce sales.

Thanksgiving also became the first day of the year to see $1 billion in sales completed on smartphones, Adobe said. It wasn’t the first time this has ever happened, but usually it’s only on Cyber Monday that we’ve seen that shift take place.

Adobe, which puts out real-time analytics tracking e-commerce sales, said that as of 2pm Pacific Time, $1.75 billion was spent online, up from $406 million at 7am — representing respective growth of 28.6 percent growth and 23.2 percent over the same periods in 2017.

This year’s $3.7 billion was nearly 28 percent up on the $2.9 billion that was spent online a year ago. Notably, stronger-than-expected activity led to Adobe revising this figure up after initially projecting $3.1 billion for Thanksgiving sales earlier this month.

(Adobe tracks e-commerce transactions across 80 of the top 100 US online retailers and says its analytics are based on over 1 trillion visits to retail sites and 55 million SKUs.)

“Black Friday” — the day after Thanksgiving — was once considered the official start of the holiday shopping season, but that start has come earlier and earlier each year, with brick-andmortar stores kicking off their sales earlier to compete more with internet-based shopping sites.

Between November 1 and Thanksgiving, a total of $38 billion will already have been spent online, up 18.6 percent, with Thanksgiving giving a one percent bump to the whole period overal. Notably, all 22 days in November have hit more than $1 billion in sales, with three days each seeing over $2 billion in spend.

That high spend reaches a kind of zenith in the next four days, when one out of every five dollars will be spent, working out to $23.4 billion in sales (or 19 percent of all holiday season shopping).

Thanksgiving is the first day of the “big five” for holiday shopping. Figures from Internet Retailer research predict that the total amount that will be spent over the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday will be $21.6 billion.

But while rising tides might lift all boats, the biggest will reap the most rewards: it also estimates that Amazon will account for nearly oneas third of all sales.

Indeed, Adobe’s figures are extrapolated from what it describes as the 80 biggest online retailers in the US.

So for a closer look at how smaller online retailers are doing, Shopify — which has some 600,000 merchants on its platform has also provided some data. It says that more than $250 million was spent in total with smaller merchants, with peak shopping seeing $465,000 per minute sold during the day. Top purchasing states were those that are the biggest: California, followed by Texas, New York and Florida.

The overall picture, interestingly, is that e-commerce continues to account for between 10 and 20 percent of all retail sales, largely the same proportion that we’ve seen for years. In other words, while the overall pie is growing in size, the proportion of the piece for online commerce does not appear to be changing for the moment.

Figures from eMarketer put overall US holiday sales at retailers at over $1 trillion for this season, while e-commerce will be around $123 billion, or around 12 percent of all sales.