The Thanksgiving spread paid off for retailers this year, as Experian Hitwise found Thanksgiving Day online traffic increased a full 71 percent in 2012 versus 2011 for the top 500 retail sites which received more than 181 million US visits. For the entire holiday week, online traffic to the top retail sites is also up 8 percent compared to last year. Plus, retail traffic increased 46 percent on Thanksgiving Day compared to the day before.
Not only did traffic to retail sites increase, but according to IBM Smarter Commerce, a unit of International Business Machines Corp which analyzes transactions from 500 US retailers, online sales increased 17.4 percent on Thanksgiving day and 20.7 percent on Black Friday when compared with 2011.
“The Thanksgiving creep revitalized the thrill for people,” Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Strategic Retail, told Reuters. “It got people excited to go out. But it pulled a lot of sales forward.”
In the last few years it has been Cyber Monday that has been the biggest online holiday shopping day, as workers return to their computers energized from the holiday shopping rush and continue making purchases. But this year the mobile shopping market has finally gone mainstream, and shoppers are using their devices to find bargains while still seated at the Thanksgiving dinner table. It is yet to be seen how the creep will affect total holiday shopping—which can account for as much as 30 percent of retailers’ annual revenue—sales. Although Black Friday used to be a single day to kick off the holiday shopping season, Scot Wingo, chief executive of e-commerce company Channel Advisor now refers to the early online shopping season as “Cyber 5.”
“Our Black Friday numbers were a little softer than Thanksgiving,” Eric Best, chief executive of Mercent, which helps merchants sell more on websites including Amazon.com, ebay.com and Google Inc’s online shopping program, told Reuters. “That tells me there are timing shifts happening this holiday season.
“What we don’t know is whether this is a zero-sum game or whether there is some benefit to retailers by broadening the holiday shopping window. There is risk that real growth in retail for the entire holiday may be overestimated based on these early numbers.”
In fact, the National Retail Federation is predicting total retail sales this holiday shopping season will increase only 4.1 percent this year to about $586 billion, compared to a 5.6 percent gain in 2011. Shoppers are concerned this year about the looming and unresolved fiscal cliff as well as an unemployment rate that continues to hover above 7 percent. Online sales, however, are expected to rise 12 percent this year to reach $96 billion, growing three times as fast as the total.