One Thing We Need to Take Out from Black Friday
Linas Beliūnas
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Some time has passed, hence, we can now easily reflect on what has happened during the Black Friday, a phenomenal shopping marathon.
Black Friday 2016 was another record-breaking day.
As online shopping continues to grow, this year’s Black Friday was another record-breaking day. Gathered data indicates that Black Friday 2016 has surpassed all the estimates, and overall sales were as high as $3.34 billion. This is more than 21% year-over-year growth. One must admit that it is quite impressive.
Mobile sales accounted for about a 1/3 of overall online sales.
Nevertheless, what is more interesting for me and where all the focus should go is the mobile. As compiled numbers indicate, mobile sales accounted for about a third of overall online sales and were equal to $1.2 billion. This is a 33% increase if compared to the year 2015. Taking into account the fact that mobile commerce is still in its relative infancy, the results are definitely exiting, and the future potential is huge.
As impressive as it may seem, the mobile’s impact on the record e-commerce sales was rather foreseeable after the Thanksgiving Day, another key shopping day. The leading retailers such as Amazon, Walmart and eBay after the shopping marathon have stressed that mobile traffic and sales were rising. For instance, Amazon has pointed out that mobile orders on Thanksgiving Day topped last year’s Cyber Monday. In addition to that, Walmart said that over 70% of the website traffic on Thanksgiving was mobile, while Target, another major retailer, shared that 60% of Thanksgiving sales were from mobile devices.
Point to remember: overall, Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales accounted for more than $5 billion.
For the first time users are accessing the internet from mobile devices rather than from the desktop computers.
Another, and probably major factor that has contributed to the rising numbers in mobile sales is the mobile internet use. According to the internet monitoring firm StatCounter, since the end of October 2016 more users around the world are now accessing the internet from mobile devices than from the desktop computers. The balance has been tipped for the first time, and now is equal to 51.2% vs. 48.7% for mobile and desktop access respectively.
What all this shows us is that mobile commerce is gaining more and more power. Also, it is important for the web overall: as the following trend is unlikely to switch, companies that have not yet focused on a mobile-first approach in their internet services, definitely should do that if they do not want to be left behind.
Read more about mobile & e-commerce:
Facebook: Emerging E-commerce Powerhouse?
Facebook Marketplace: A Threat or An Opportunity?
M-Commerce. Motivations & Barriers.
Mobile Commerce. The Rising Giant.
Forget the New iPhone – Apple Pay is the BIG Thing