Trends Point to Black Friday Outselling Cyber Monday Online This Year, Says Report
It’s the last thing that beleaguered brick-and-mortar retailers want to hear after a significant falloff in holiday foot traffic, but Black Friday online sales in 2017 could eclipse those of Cyber Monday, predicted Adobe Digital Insights in a post-2016 holiday season retail wrap.
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Black Friday online sales in 2016 jumped 21.6 percent over 2015, said ADI, compared with 12.1 percent online sales growth on Cyber Monday. Online holiday revenue Nov. 1-Dec. 31 grew 11 percent vs. 2015 to $91.7 billion, and billion-dollar sales days were up by four to 57 during the season, said the data analytics company, which credited internet search with boosting Black Friday e-commerce performance.
Search advertising spending surged 16 percent year over year on Black Friday, said ADI, vs. a 5 percent increase on Cyber Monday. Black Friday impressions jumped 20 percent, and Cyber Monday impressions slipped 2 percent, it said. “At that rate of closure,” ADI expects Black Friday "to surpass Cyber Monday in online sales this year.” Cost per click was 7 percent higher on Cyber Monday, it said. “Advertisers who put money toward search ads on Black Friday were able to more efficiently land folks on their websites and get them to transact.”
A late holiday season surge around shipping cut-offs pushed up the $75 million revenue mark by six days, said ADI. The $25 billion holiday season revenue mark was hit around the same time as in 2015, it said, indicating increased spending later in the season. Revenue in the last seven days of December grew more than 20 percent year on year, and Dec. 19, the last Monday before Christmas, was also a high-volume day, said ADI.
Shopping behaviors changed after the high-profile Black Friday/Cyber Monday stretch, said ADI. Customers bought big-ticket items on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and then last-minute and one-off gifts later in the season. Post-Cyber Monday, conversion rates went up and average order value went down -- until it was too late to ship in time for the holidays, ADI said.
Just 40 percent of retailers experienced above-average growth on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the two biggest shopping days of the year, said ADI. Those with higher revenue averaged 48 percent sales growth, while the other 60 percent had an average decline of 8 percent. “This appears to indicate that the Internet has reached saturation and growing websites stole share from the others,” said analyst Becky Tasker.
Smartphone traffic was up for the season vs. 2015, but mobile conversion rates lagged those of PCs by 2.4 times. Smartphone conversion was highest on Cyber Monday, at 2.8 percent, some 26 percent below the desktop average, it said.
Smartphone visits were “less valuable" than desktop visits during the holidays, "causing a drag on potential revenue, especially as visits increased,” said Tasker. Websites that grew the most during consumers’ planning phase -- Nov. 1-Nov. 23 -- saw half their traffic come from mobile devices, said ADI. But once the major shopping weekend hit, “the mobile gap disappeared and both websites that grew vs. those that didn’t tracked the same share of mobile traffic," she said.
NPD, meanwhile, said in a report robust retail sales leading up to the Christmas and Hanukkah week slacked off during the final week of 2016, returning to the “lethargic trend seen through most of the holiday season.” Cumulatively, revenue for the nine weeks of the 2016 holiday shopping season was 1 percent behind the nine weeks of the 2015 season, it said, tracking in-store and online sales.
The last week of December is an important part of the holiday season equation as “gift cards and unwanted holiday gifts bring shoppers into stores they may not frequent, giving stores the opportunity to introduce themselves to a new audience,” said NPD analyst Marshal Cohen. “The dynamics of holiday shopping are changing, and retailers need to learn how to better leverage this post-holiday opportunity.”