Total Black Friday retail sales online and in stores rose 3.4 percent year-over-year as shoppers snapped up merchandise the day after Thanksgiving, according to preliminary estimates by payments processor Mastercard.
Black Friday e-commerce retail sales increased by 14.6. percent year-over-year as consumers shopped for deals online, while in-store sales increased by 0.7 percent, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, a metric measuring U.S. retail sales across the Mastercard payments network combined with estimates for cash and check payments.
Black Friday kicked off the holiday shopping season for retailers and competition has intensified to win shoppers seeking discounts.
Shopper Corey Coscioni, 58, looked for bargains online as well as in Chicago-area stores on Friday, seeking “gifts for everyone: my wife, my daughter, and myself.” His stops included Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Anthropologie. “While we’re waiting in line, I’ll be shopping.”
Spending during the holiday season overall, from Nov. 1 through Dec. 24, is expected to be up 3.2 percent year-over-year, according to earlier estimates from Mastercard SpendingPulse. SpendingPulse excludes automotive sales and is not adjusted for inflation.
“Black Friday was a good indicator of how the holiday season is positively shaping up,” said Michelle Meyer, chief economist, Mastercard Economics Institute.
Department store chains such as Macy’s and Kohl’s, as well as big-box retailer Target, could see muted sales this season, which is shorter with only 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Sales at Best Buy and Target on Friday were relatively flat year-over-year, according to data firm Facteus, which analyzes swipes of consumer credit and debit cards to measure shifts in spending patterns.
U.S. shoppers made more purchases online from mobile phones, laptops, desktops, and other devices, a trend that potentially favors e-commerce giants such as Amazon.com and Walmart. Walmart, which operates 4,700 U.S. stores, has invested heavily in store-to-home deliveries for the holiday season to boost e-commerce.
An updated tally from Adobe Inc on Saturday showed that Americans made roughly $10.8 billion in online purchases on Friday, up 10.2 percent from a year earlier. Top-selling merchandise online included makeup, skincare and haircare products, as well as bluetooth speakers and espresso machines, according to its Adobe Analytics tally. Adobe keeps track of devices that use its software to help power more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites.
Separately, Salesforce, a cloud-based software company that tracks a different array of online spending categories, said online sales in the U.S. rose 7 percent on Friday to $17.5 billion, according to its own updated tally on Saturday. Salesforce, which analyzed the activity of more than 1.5 billion global shoppers, said shoppers bought more home appliances and furniture.
Because the estimates aren’t adjusted for inflation, higher prices account for at least some of the spending growth.
