If Black Friday’s online shopping was any indication, consumers are increasingly buying online. According to comScore, total online shopping was up 11 percent over last year’s Black Friday. Sales at two leading retailers, Amazon.com and the online site of Wal-Mart, increased 28 percent and 22 percent, respectively.
The actual dollar amount spent on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving when retailers expect to go into the black, was about $595 million. So far in this holiday season, which comScore measures from Nov. 1, $10.57 billion has been spent on online purchases, a three percent gain over the same period in 2008.
Discounting and Promotions
comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said that while this level of spending suggests a somewhat more optimistic view of expected holiday shopping totals this year, “it may also reflect the heavy discounting and creative promotions being put forth by retailers that now encompass the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.”
The analytics firm also noted that, in addition to actually making purchases online, consumers increasingly also go online to do research. The research includes making choices about products, finding out about products, and checking out sites with summary information of Black Friday deals.
Some of those sites have names like BlackFriday.info, Black-Friday.net, or TheBlackFriday.com. comScore looked at eight of these sites for the week leading up to Black Friday, and then compared their traffic with the statistics for last year.
It found that the most trafficked site, BFads.net, showed a four percent increase in unique visitors over last year, with 3.9 million unique visitors, and third-placed Black-Friday.net had a huge 136 percent increase, from 956,000 to 2.3 million visitors. Second-placed BlackFriday.info actually dropped by 17 percent, but still had nearly 3.5 million visitors. Many of the Black Friday sites pointed to the major retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Amazon and…