This year’s Black Friday shopping frenzy set a new record for online spending, according to data from Adobe Analytics.
As expected, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic ensured that this time around more shoppers opted to place orders from the comfort of their own home rather than risk infection by heading out to crowded malls.
Adobe’s research shows that consumers spent $9 billion via online purchases on Friday, marking an increase of 21.6% from the same day last year when online sales hit $7.4 billion.
Black Friday 2020 was the second-largest online spending day in U.S. history, according to Adobe, coming in behind Cyber Monday 2019, when sales reached $9.4 billion. This year’s Cyber Monday is forecast to become America’s largest online sales day ever, with Adobe expecting spending to reach somewhere between $10.8 billion and $12.7 billion.
Popular tech gear
Shoppers threw an array of goods into their virtual shopping carts on Black Friday, with the most popular electronics items including Apple AirPods, Apple Watches, Samsung TVs, and smart home devices such as Amazon Echo speakers, according to Adobe’s data.
Adobe noted that this year, more people than ever shopped from their smartphone rather than a personal computer or by other means, with $3.6 billion spent using a handset, marking a 25.3% increase over last year’s Black Friday, and totaling 40% of all online spending.
Besides ordering items for delivery to their homes, shoppers also turned to in-store and curbside pickup, which increased by 52% compared to Black Friday 2019, suggesting again that the pandemic meant many customers were reluctant to spend time shopping in-store.
“We are seeing strong growth as consumers continue to move shopping from offline to online this year,” Adobe said in a statement sent to Digital Trends. “New consoles, phones, smart devices, and TVs that are traditional Black Friday purchases are sharing online shopping cart space this year with unorthodox Black Friday purchases such as groceries, clothes, and alcohol, that would previously have been purchased in-store.”
Adobe’s findings were drawn from analysis of around one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million stock-keeping units, and 80 of the 100 largest retailers in the U.S.
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