Black Friday Sales In US Beat Expectations & Records; But China’s Singles Day Sale Was Bigger!

Those who are in the Digital Marketing & Retail niche since long, are aware of the importance and significance of Black Friday sales. Every year, just a day after Thanksgiving festival, Internet and offline retailers all over USA present some of the most outstanding, unexpected deals and offers to customers.

In the past, we had seen mini-riots breaking out in the retail stores, as consumers scrambled for low cost deals and amazing offers.

However, this year, Black Friday was somewhat bleak for the offline stores, as US consumers opted to go full-on for online-specific Black Friday sales, and the record number of sales figures confirms this.

Compared to last year, Black Friday sales increased by 17.9% to reach $7.9 billion; however, note here that this number includes both Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales, which means two days of sales promotion.

This is the highest sales figure of Black Friday sales ever in the US, for ecommerce.

But, compared to Singles Day sales in China, the amount is rather small. With $25 billion of sales on November 11th, Singles Day sales is world’s biggest one-day sales event, and they have comprehensively beaten Black Friday sales here.

Now, all eyes are set on Cyber Monday sales, for which analysts are predicting somewhere between $6-7 billion of sales, making it one of the largest Cyber Monday sales ever.

Black Friday Sales: The Numbers & Trends

The numbers which we will share are based on Adobe Analytics’ massive data points, which have been collected after analysing more than a trillion online store visits across 4500 online portals, spread across US and rest of the world.

As per Adobe, total of $2.87 billion online sales was recorded on Thanksgiving Day, which was November 23rd and $5.03 billion was recorded on Black Friday, which was November 24th.

But, the line between Black Friday and Thanksgiving Sales is blurring, thanks to over-aggressive retailers, and the analysts are using the combined figure of $7.9 billion to describe the overall sales, via online websites.

Last year, Black Friday alone churned out $4.3 billion of sales, which has increased to $5.03 billion this year, which is an increase of 16.9%. And, Thanksgiving Sales increased by 18.3%, from $1.3 billion last year to $2.87 billion this year.

And, the biggest surprise (which was kind of expected): As per Commerce marketing firm Criteo, 40% of all Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales happened from mobile, which is an increase of 29% compared to last year. And as per Adobe Analytics, 54.3% of all online store visits occurred from mobiles and gadgets, and mobile accounted for 36.8% of all sales. As per Adobe, 26% of all sales happened via mobile phones.

If we compare these number with India’s ecommerce story, then the difference is quite easily visible. This festive season in India, which are Dusshera and Diwali, overall $1.5 billion of online sales was generated.

Indian ecommerce has a long way to go!

What People Bought This Black Friday?

Top three products which were smash hits this Black Friday and Thanksgiving were Chromecast, Roku streaming devices and the Nintendo Switch

Other prominent products which were sold like hot cakes included:

 

• Hatchimals & Colleggtibles toys,
• PJ Masks
• L.O.L. Surprise Dolls
• Ride On Cars.
• Apple Airpods
• Sony PlayStation VR

On the other hand, Amazon, which reportedly garnered 50% of all sales, revealed the top 5 selling products between November 23rd and November 24th.

These are:

• Amazon Echo Dot
• Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote
• TP-Link Smart Plug
• Instant Pot DUO80 8 Qt 7-in-1 Multi- Use Programmable Pressure Cooker
• 23andmeDNA Test

Interestingly, top three products are Amazon’s own products.

You can find some interesting data and numbers related to Black Friday sales, churned out by Adobe here.