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Thanksgiving weekend proved busy for retail, as millions of consumers shopped in stores and online.
While Black Friday doesn’t necessarily garner the same frenzy from consumers it once did, the weekend still brought millions out to score deals and discounts, according to The Washington Post.
Based on the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Thanksgiving Weekend Survey, more than 151 million people said they shopped in store and/or online over the weekend. Of those shoppers, the average spending per person totaled $299.60, with an average of $229.56 specifically going towards gifts, or 76.6 percent of total purchases.
However, the trade group says it changed the methodology of its annual Thanksgiving weekend survey, so figures cannot be fairly compared to last year’s results. Yet the survey suggests that as retailers’ deals have spread out over days or weeks, shoppers are spreading out their shopping online and in-store before the holiday hits.
“We recognize the Thanksgiving weekend shopping experience is much different than it used to be as just as many people want that unique, exclusive online deal as they do that in-store promotion,” says NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay. “It is clear that the age-old holiday tradition of heading out to stores with family and friends is now equally matched in the new tradition of looking online for holiday savings opportunities.”
Overall, online shopping was a big factor over the holiday weekend, especially mobile shopping. Based on a report by Moovweb, a cloud-based platform for mobile solutions, mobile shopping sessions were up 45 percent, with the smartphone’s share of revenue increasing 36 percent compared to the previous year, according to an article by Inc.
“Mobile usage across all metrics has exceeded all our expectations. It has created a sense of FOMO amongst consumers,” Haresh Kumar, vice president of marketing for Moovweb, says. “It’s clear that mobile shopping will eclipse desktop numbers sooner than we had imagined.”
