US consumers blow $3.34bn on Black Friday, break mobile shopping record

It was an extremely healthy Black Friday for US retailers according to new data released by Adobe.

The company this week published its 2016 online shopping report covering Black Friday and Thanksgiving, and the numbers represent a positive trend over 2015. Adobe’s report is based on “aggregated and anonymous data from 22.6-billion visits to retail websites” and covers approximately 80% of the US’s top 100 retailers.

Adobe notes that buyers in the US blew more than US$5.2-billion at the end of Friday. This marks a 17.7% increase over 2015.

“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”, the company explains.

Other takeaways:

• Sony’s PlayStation 4 was the most popular product and video game console
• Pokemon Sun and Moon were the most popular games
• Samsung lead in television sales
• Search advertisements were the biggest drivers (38.3%), followed by email (17.8%)and shopper helper sites (16.5%)
• The biggest average discount was awarded to tablets (25.4%), followed by televisions (23.3%)

Black Friday 2016 was also the first day in US shopping history that mobile sales topped a billion dollars. US$1.2-billion was spent from a mobile device, marking a 33% increase over 2015.

Black Friday 2016 was a landmark shopping day for mobile device transactions, Adobe reveals

As for Thanksgiving, consumers dropped US$1.93-billion post-turkey, which marked an 11.5% increase over 2015. Incredibly, mobile transactions accounted for 57% of visits, and 40% of sales. 27% of the latter was from smartphones.

According to Tamara Gaffney, Adobe’s principal analyst and director of its Digital Insights division, Black Friday seems to have dethroned Cyber Monday as the US’s biggest single retail day on the calendar.

“With the full day total coming in at $3.34 billion, Black Friday may have just dethroned Cyber Monday’s position as the largest online shopping day of the year. Shoppers are still buying at higher than expected levels in the early morning hours of Small Business Saturday.”

Adobe predicts that Cyber Monday could total US$3.36-billion this year, with “Giving Tuesday” — the day following Cyber Monday — following up with over US$2.1-billion in sales.