While the final verdict on the holiday season won’t be known for several months, the initial results from the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday contained a lot of encouraging numbers for retailers.
E-commerce was the biggest winner over the weekend, showing the strongest growth year over year. U.S. online sales for the weekend were $41.1 billion, and online spending set new records on each of the five days, according to data from Adobe Analytics.
The National Retail Federation (NRF), in a holiday recap, applauded the news that more Americans shopped over the holiday weekend than had previously been expected to, according to consumer surveys.
More Americans Shopped During Black Friday Weekend Than Expected
This year’s post-holiday survey, conducted by Prosper Insights and Analytics for the NRF, showed that an estimated 197 million consumers shopped either online or in stores over the five-day weekend. That was about 13.6 million more shoppers than originally forecast.
The five-day weekend “continues to play a significant role in the holiday season for both consumers and retailers,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said in announcing the results.
“Even with this year’s shortened shopping period and the multitude of early sales promotions from retailers, this past weekend exceeded expectations in terms of the sheer volume of shoppers,” Shay said.
Black Friday Weekend Spending Continues to Shift To Online
But the initial numbers do show a growing trend towards online shopping that is shifting dollars away from in-store purchases.
The Mastercard Spending Pulse report, which measures both in-store and online retail sales, found that online sales were up 14.6% on Black Friday, while in-store sales rose by only 0.7% compared to Black Friday last year.
Total U.S. sales, excluding automotive, were up 3.4% on Black Friday, compared to the previous year, according to Mastercard Spending Pulse.
Black Friday In-Store Traffic Down
In-store traffic over the five-day period was down 2.3% compared to 2023, according to Sensormatic Solutions, which uses Shopper Trak Analytics data to measure visits to retailers. Despite the decline, Sensormatic Solutions noted that the holiday weekend still remains one of the more popular shopping periods. Store traffic during the weekend performed better than the average year-to-date traffic, which has been down 3%.
Sensormatic Solutions today revised its traffic number for Black Friday, from down 8.2% to down 6.3%.
Shopping on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, Dec. 1 was up 2.4% compared to a year ago, bucking the declining traffic trend.
Stores, however, still could see a last-minute surge of in-store shoppers. Sensormatic Solutions is expecting that four of the five busiest shopping days leading up to the holidays will occur in the final 10 days before Christmas, on Saturday, Dec. 14; Saturday Dec. 21; Sunday, Dec. 22; and Monday, Dec. 23.
For online spending, Adobe Analytics, which tracks spending by analyzing over 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, reported Cyber Monday sales of $13.3 billion, up 7.3% over 2023. That set a record for online spending in a single day.
Thanksgiving Day was up 8.8% at $6.1 billion. Black Friday was up 10.2% at $10.8 billion, and spending on Saturday and Sunday combined was up 5.8% at $10.9 billion.
The use of mobile devices to make online purchases continued to grow, Adobe Analytics reported. On Cyber Monday, 57% of online sales were made on a mobile device, up 13.3% year-over-year. In 2019, only 33% of Cyber Monday online purchases were made with a mobile device.
E-commerce sales platform Shopify reported that it rang up a record $11.5 billion in global sales over the long holiday weekend, a 24% increase over last year. Shopify also reported that 16,500-plus merchants made their first sale on the platform this weekend, and that 67,000-plus merchants had their highest-selling day ever on Shopify during the weekend.
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