The shopping frenzy

When the American conglomerates started tempting people away from spending another day with their families after Thanksgiving, thus turning this time into the shopping frenzy of Black Friday, it became quite a good metric for going over the latest consumer buying trends. IBM’s extensive data sifting recently revealed that there were a number of interesting changes.


For instance, web sales for Thanksgiving increased 17.4%. At the same time, online sales for Black Friday grew 20.7% on the previous year. Around 25% of all consumers preferred to use a mobile device to visit a retail website. The latter was up from 14.3% last year, despite the fact that mobile sales were at 16%. Anyway, it is still a considerable boost from 9.8% last year. Major part of consumers tracked bargains in-store, on the Internet, and on their mobile devices in order to make sure they got the most attractive offers. According to IBM, 58% of all consumers on Black Friday were using their smartphones to browse on the day.


Overall, there was more than 20% increase on sales, but consumers were noticed spending slightly less per order, on average, and with fewer items. Among those who visited using mobile devices, about 10% did so using iPad. Another 9% of shoppers were using an iPhone, while only 5% of them used Android devices.

In the meantime, social media proved efficient to spread positive sentiment and help brand image, because 75% of people were normally very happy with promotions, shipping, convenience, and the retailers.

Nevertheless, advertisers on such social services as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube kept trying to monetize these networks, because all of them only generated less than 1% of overall web sales on Black Friday, which is 35% worse than last year.