Why ‘Couch Shopping’ Won Black Friday

Black Friday Couch Shopping

It’s hard to imagine Black Friday without picturing droves of people waking up at the crack of dawn to run through retail stores grabbing up all the discounted items they can.

But this year, many consumers opted to “couch shop” on Black Friday rather than deal with the traditional hustle and bustle of shopping at brick-and-mortar locations, Forbes reported.

While many industry reports highlighted that this year’s Black Friday saw a significant decrease in foot traffic, it looks as though retailers were able to make up for it with record online shopping turnout over the four-day holiday shopping period following Thanksgiving.

As was widely forecast ahead of the big shopping weekend, digital devices and online commerce surged during the holiday shopping weekend.

Adobe Digital Insights said that Black Friday sales rose 21.6 percent to $3.34 billion, with Thanksgiving making an estimated $2 billion contribution (an 11.4 percent increase over 2015) to the weekend’s shopping sales.

“With the full-day total coming in at $3.34 billion, Black Friday may have just dethroned Cyber Monday’s position as the largest online shopping day of the year,” Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst and director of Adobe Digital Insights, explained in a statement.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales clocked in at $5.27 billion, an 18 percent increase from a year earlier; that also beat Adobe’s pre-season forecast of $5.05 billion. About 20 percent of that online revenue, a little over $1 billion, was courtesy of smartphones and other mobile devices — but mostly smartphones.

Some retailers saw even more impressive mobile sales — Walmart and Target both reported 60 percent of their online orders came from mobile.

The increase of eCommerce on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Forbes noted, was fueled by “digital doorbusters.” According to the Verizon Retail Index, virtual traffic on Thanksgiving surged by 10 percent from 2015 and rose 9 percent from 2015 on Black Friday.

Telsey Advisory Group used retail channel checks to identify Black Friday “outperformers,” which included Best Buy, H&M, JCPenney, Limited Brands, Macy’s and Target. On the other hand, Ann Taylor, Gap, teen retailers and Walmart were cited as underperformers.

“In an attempt to simplify Black Friday and focus on online sales, Walmart seems to have fallen a little short in the stores,” Dana Telsey, CEO of Telsey Advisory Group, said in a report. “We also noticed relatively high inventory at Walmart, something we will closely monitor over the next month.”