Black Friday Online Sales Hit A Record $3.1b And Mobile Played A Huge Role

Today is Cyber Monday and it is usually the Monday after Black Friday which is the Friday after thanksgiving on Thursday.

So seeing as the Cyber Monday is still on, we would have to wait till tomorrow to get figures. Adobe though has released figures for online spending this past Friday and it shows that more people are buying stuff but more interestingly, on mobile.

“More than $5 billion ($5.27 billion) was spent online by the end of Black Friday, a 17.7 percent increase year-over-year (YoY). Black Friday set a new record by surpassing the three-billion-dollar mark for the first time at $3.34 billion (21.6 percent growth YoY) while Thanksgiving accounted for the remaining $1.93 billion. Black Friday became the first day in retail history to drive over one billion dollars in mobile revenue at $1.2 billion, a 33 percent growth YoY”

Walmart for example said that 60 percent of Black Friday orders on Walmart.com came from mobile devices and at the end of the day, 55 percent of shoppers did so from mobile and of that figure, 45 percent coming from smartphones, 10 percent from tablets.

It even gets better, of the total sales made on the day, mobile accounted for 36 percent of total sales and this breaks down to 25 percent from smartphones and 11 percent from tablets. Of those devices, iOS led Android with average sales of $144 compared to Android.

While smartphones continue to lead the mobile charge, their conversion rate though is still lower than tablets and desktops. Smartphone conversions stood at 1.9 percent compared to 3.7 percent for desktop and 4 percent for desktop.

The Adobe sampling is based on data from 22 billion visits by users to retail sites and this includes 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 American retailers.

They noted finally that the top selling tech items were iPads, Samsung 4K TVs. Macbook Air, LG TVs and Xbox. That said, Apple seemed to have a good Black Friday.

While Black Friday is American shopping tradition, it seems to have spread to other parts of the world including Nigeria. The Nigerian ecommerce sector is growing at a fast rate and is projected to be worth $13b by 2018 and this is big considering that the ecommerce boom is Nigeria started less than a decade ago.

Mobile has been a main focus this year so far. The number of users accessing the internet on mobile has now surpassed desktop for the time and sites like Google now record over 1 billion mobile visits monthly with plans to unveil a separate mobile search index in future.