Who Ruled 2015 Black Friday eCommerce Sales?

According to digitaltrends(dot)com, this year, over 900 million dollars of Black Friday sales came from smartphones and tablets. In fact, “Smartphones and tablets accounted for 36.1 percent of e-commerce orders on Black Friday, up from 30.3 percent on Black Friday last year.”*

Online, Amazon ruled Black Friday. However, the extent of that reach is more than significant. According to techcrunch**, Amazon garnered a whopping 1/3 of all ecommerce sales (35.7%*) on Nov. 27^th. To put this into perspective, Best Buy (second place), accounted for 8.23% of online sales, significantly lower than Amazon’s.

Some of the drivers of Amazon’s success are an uptick in online sales in general during this timeframe; mobile penetration and mobile optimized campaigns; and, Amazon branded/owned product lines unavailable elsewhere.

Retailers like Staples, who make it easy to buy online and receive your shipment the next day, are removing many of the previous barriers to shopping online such as “wait time” and longer shipping timelines.

With the growth in mobile shopping, in addition to differentiating their products and promotions, retailers will need to optimize the checkout, fulfillment and shipping processes/timelines to increase the appeal of online shopping. The shipping industry needs to stay up to date with changes in consumer expectations.

*http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/black-friday-905-million-sales-came-smartphones-tablets-ios-led-way/#ixzz3tNBs28mF

**http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/01/amazon-dominated-36-of-online-black-friday-sales-says-slice/?ncid=mobilenavtrend#.qaxpjf4:ouaL