Online retail sales surge 42% year-over-year on Black Friday
Despite unusually nice weather across much of the U.S., consumers flocked to their computers on Black Friday to drive a 42% year-over-year increase in online retail sales to $434 million, reports comScore Networks Inc. EBay, Amazon and Walmart.com grabbed the most traffic, according to Nielsen Net/Ratings. Total retail sales rose 6% to $8.96 billion, says ShopperTrak RCT Corp.
“This growth figure is especially encouraging for online retailers, when taking into account that much of the country saw beautiful weather on Friday,” says comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is recognized as one of the busiest shopping days of the year and the point when many retailers become profitable for the year.
The heavy shopping volumes hurt site performance in some cases, however, as Walmart.com went down Friday morning and took until early in the afternoon to return to normal, and Amazon.com experienced periodic outages and slowdowns, according to Gomez Inc., provider of site performance monitoring services.
During the first 24 days of this month, total online retail spending reached $8.31 billion, up 23% from $6.75 billion in the comparable year-ago period, comScore says. Online retail spending rose 23% to $77.5 billion in January through October, up from $62.6 billion in the year-ago period, it adds.
Visits to comparison shopping sites rose 21% year-over-year on Friday, as visits to ShopLocal.com alone rose in triple digits, helping to drive traffic to stores, comScore says.
EBay garnered the most online traffic on Friday, with 7.5 million unique visitors, followed by Amazon.com, with 3.4 million visitors, and Walmart.com, with 3.2 million, Nielsen/NetRatings says.
The number of unique visitors on Friday to the Nielsen/NetRatings Holiday eShopping Index, which is comprised of more than 120 e-retailers across 12 product categories, rose 12% year-to-year to 19.2 million from 17.2 million. The fastest-growing product category was consumer electronics, with a 211% increase in visitors, followed by apparel, up 117%, and home-and-garden, up 87%, Nielsen/NetRatings says.
In other reports, Hitwise notes that Walmart.com had the largest share, at 18.26%, of visits among the 100 web sites in the Hitwise Online Retail 100 index, marking it the second consecutive year it ranked on top. Walmart.com was followed by BestBuy.com, with a market share in the index of 8.75%; Amazon, 8.36%; CircuitCity.com, 6.98% and Target.com, 6.06%.
PriceGrabber.com, meanwhile, says it set a new Black Friday traffic record, with a 45% year-over-year increase in traffic referred to its partner retail sites.
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