US online shoppers spend record 4.2 bln USD on Thanksgiving

A woman does shopping for Black Friday sales at an outlet in San Francisco, the United States, Nov. 28, 2019. (Photo: Xinhua) Source: Xinhua;

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) --US online shoppers spent 4.2 billion dollars on Thanksgiving, up by 14.5 percent from last year and reaching a record high, according to the web analytics tool Adobe Analytics.

The top three online selling products on Thanksgiving were Frozen 2 toys, L.O.L Surprise dolls and Amazon's Fire TV. Nintendo Switch game consoles, Beats headphones and Hot Wheels toys had been online shoppers' favorite choices last year.

Adobe Analytics tracks 80 percent of online transactions at 100 of the largest retailers in the United States.

From Nov. 1 to Thanksgiving, online sales totalled 57.1 billion dollars. Smartphones made up 34.5 percent of all e-commerce sales, while some 60 percent of the revenue came from desktop computers, and 5 percent from tablets.

It is predicted that online sales for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, will hit 7.5 billion dollars. As of 10 a.m. EST (1500GMT), online sales already reached 767 million dollars, up by 19.2 percent from last year.

Cyber Monday, which falls on the first Monday after Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, is considered the biggest online shopping day of the year.

Macy's Herald Square opens its doors at 5pm on Thanksgiving Day for thousands of Black Friday shoppers in search of amazing sales and doorbuster deals on November 28, 2019, in New York.

This year, Adobe Analytics expects online sales on Cyber Monday to reach 9.4 billion dollars, up by 18.9 percent from 2018.

Holiday season shopping started early this year, as retailers began offering discounts earlier than usual, in the hope of making up for a shorter holiday season which is six days less between Thanksgiving and Christmas than last year.

Some 56 percent of consumers interviewed during the first week of November had already begun their holiday shopping, according to an annual survey released last week by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and the Prosper Insights & Analytics.

"Consumers don't wait for Thanksgiving or Black Friday anymore and neither do retailers," said Phil Rist, Prosper's executive vice president of strategy. "Retailers responded this year by offering promotions earlier than ever, with some rolling out holiday deals even before Halloween."

During the full holiday season, which Adobe defines as the period between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, shoppers are expected to spend 143.8 billion dollars online, up by 14.1 percent from last year.

Sales for the full holiday season will total between 727.9 billion and 730.7 billion dollars, according to NRF forecasts. Consumers are expected to spend an average 1,047.83 dollars, an increase of 4 percent over last year, according to NRF's annual survey released last month.

Black Friday VS Singles Day

Source: CGTN, by Gerald Tan

It's Black Friday here in the United States. The day after Thanksgiving is one of the biggest shopping events of the year. So how did Black Friday come about, and how do the numbers stack up globally?

It's that time of year when we just can't quite escape signs like these: Holiday Sale. Doorbusters. Black Friday Specials. In fact, the world's two largest economies, the United States and China, naturally also have some of the biggest spenders.

But how do they compare when it comes to their largest shopping events of the year?

Here in the United States, it's Black Friday. The term originally coined in Philadelphia in the 1950s to describe the annual shopping and traffic chaos the day after Thanksgiving. Eventually, retailers adopted it. They said it was the first day of the year they would turn a profit, the ink in their ledger books going from red to black.

Nowadays, Black Friday is a nationwide extravaganza. Last year, U.S. retailers raked in 6.2 billion dollars in online sales on Black Friday--the highest ever. That's not counting sales in brick-and-mortar stores, either. And the spending binge continued.

Bleeding into what's dubbed, Cyber Monday. Total sales: a record of 7.9 billion dollars. Still, spending for the entire weekend combined was eclipsed by China's own shopping bonanza: Singles Day.

Celebrated on November 11th, or Double Eleven, it began as an anti-Valentine's event in the 1990s. Note the number of "ones" in the date. In 2009, tech mastermind Jack Ma adopted the day for his online portal Alibaba and the rest is history.

Some of the figures from this year's 24-hour event, truly staggering. Sales hit 1 billion dollars in just over a minute. And 13-billion dollars in the first hour. At the end of Singles' Day, a record-shattering 38.4 billion dollars in total sales.

Over the years, retailers in other countries have begun co-opting these shopping holidays for their own, in the hopes of cashing in. And it's a strategy that seems to be working when the shops have sales, the people will spend.

Will Black Friday sales beat Singles Day in 2019?

Source: CGTN, by Fanyi Xu

Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the biggest shopping event in the United States, take place this week. In 2018, $14.2 billion worth of items were sold across the US on Black Friday and the Cyber Monday.

However when comparing Black Friday in the US to Singles Day in China, there is no comparison. In 2019, Alibaba alone sold $38.4 billion worth of goods on Singles Day. Singles Day started ten years ago by the Alibaba portal as a 24-hour shopping event.

In 2018, Alibaba made total US$30.8 billion and shipped over one billion packages in one day. This record is over two times of the total sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the same year.

‍Do you think the Black Friday in 2019

will beat the Singles Day this time?

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