The figures for Thanksgiving and Black Friday shopping are in and online shopping is gaining huge momentum that foretells a continued shift to more dollars being spent online. Experian and Hitwise tallied up their numbers and what they tell us is the online shopping traffic on Thanksgiving day was up 71% over last year’s volume. All together, the top 500 retail sites saw over 181 million visits from American shoppers on Thanksgiving and traffic was up an average of 8% for the top sites.
There were no big surprises who got the biggest volume of online shoppers visiting their sites as Amazon, Walmart and Target racked up the most traffic, with Best Buy and Sears not far behind. Amazon is the only one of the top five sites that doesn’t have a physical presence with retail stores and they are reaping the benefits of pioneering the online shopping business model.
One of the facts that may have come as a surprise to some is the massive piece of the online shopping pie that was purchased through Apple mobile devices, either iPads or iPhones. A full 10% of all online purchases were made on iPads, which accounted for 88% of all purchases made on some type of tablet. While Android tablets have been gaining significant ground it was clear that Apple was the king of online Thanksgiving weekend shopping this year, in terms of the device used to make the purchase. iPad purchases dominated so completely they accounted for more than twelve times the traffic tallied by Barnes and Noble Nooks, Amazon Kindles and Samsung Galaxy tablets combined. None of the other tablet platforms accounted for even 4% of total traffic.
These figures seems to go against logic given that Android smartphones were 75% of all smartphone sales in the third quarter, while Apple’s iPhone’s only represented 15% of the total sold. So, some may wonder what Apple is doing that Android is not to get consumers using their products to shop. That will likely be a question asked in frequently in planning meetings for those interested in more sales being generated via Android devices.
With some experts saying there are better deals online leading up to, and after Black Friday, there are more and more voices telling consumers that standing in line at retail stores is not the way to get the best deals. Cyber Monday will be a day to watch to see how things continue to unfold as shoppers continue to search for bargains leading up to Christmas. The new normal may be a landscape where deals are plentiful online year-round, with even deeper discounts offered throughout the holidays to ensure companies draw shoppers to their websites instead of their competitors’.
The future may see the bulk of holiday shopping being done by consumers in robes and slippers, rather than bundled up in gloves and parkas. The future in online shopping is here and the only choice any retailer has is to embrace it and define their strategy to stake out their foothold online. Where brick and mortar locations fit into the shopping landscape will likely be different for each company and shopper, but their place in the overall business of retailing has changed forever.