This year’s Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday shopping weekend was record breaking for e-commerce.
We have compiled a snapshot of how the long weekend played out in the U.S. so that online merchants can prepare well in advance for the 2017 Holiday season. Here are key takeaways, by the numbers:
Thanksgiving Day – Savor, Search, Shop
- 5% of consumers say they shopped online while actually at the Thanksgiving table
- $1.93 billion in sales, up 11.5% YoY (Adobe)
- Mobile sales alone reached $449 million between midnight and 5 pm, a 58% YoY leap (Adobe)
Black Friday – Deepening Discounts
- $3.34 billion in sales, up 21.6% YoY (Adobe)
- Online sales reached $490 million on Black Friday morning, with mobile generating 57% of visits and a hearty 40% chunk of sales (Adobe)
- Black Friday deals among top 10 U.S. retailers were 5% greater than last year – painful for profits (FORTUNE)
Cyber Monday – Mobile All The Way
- $3.45 billion in sales, up 12.1% YoY (Adobe)
- $1.19 billion of those sales, or a whopping 35%, were conducted via mobile
- $139 average order value; $21 less than on Thanksgiving Day, given deeper discounts (Adobe)
- 7% increase in online sales YoY (IBM)
Thanksgiving-Cyber Monday Weekend (Nov 24-28) – E-commerce FTW!
- 10 million more Americans shopped online than in stores; 108.5 million vs. 99.1 million (NRF)
- 6% of Millennials (ages 18-34), 35.5% of those 35+, made a purchase via smartphone (LivePerson)
- Mobile revenue increased 30% YoY and desktop increased 6% YoY (Branding Brand)
FORTUNE Editor Phil Wahba recaps the weekend best: “To compete with Amazon, traditional retailers have been pouring billions into their e-commerce offerings. That includes upgrading shopping apps, equipping stores to handle pickups for online orders as well as ship e-commerce orders, and introducing mobile payment apps. The efforts have led to sharper e-commerce performance for many.”
The key to e-commerce sales and success this year was readiness. It is clear that retailers have stepped up their game online across their websites, mobile sites, and mobile/tablet apps.
What the data doesn’t show us, however, is potentially lost sales. How many mission-focused shoppers “bounced” when unable to find items they were looking for using site search and navigation? How many sales were lost when a shopper browsing on a smartphone or tablet had to wait for a page to load or scroll for far too long? After all, while conversions were higher over holiday averages, smartphones only saw 1.9 percent, tablets only 3.7 percent, and desktops were at 4.3 percent – indicating there is still much work to be done to streamline the mobile experience.
Here is a great place to start. The SLI Site Search and The Mobile Experience paper is an invaluable guide for ways to provide mobile and tablet shoppers with an amazing user experience. Get started, now…
