This year, Black Friday set records as online sales hit $6.22 billion, according to Adobe Analytics data. That’s up by 23.6% from 2017’s $5.03 billion hauls.
The surrounding days’ online sales were equally impressive at $2.4 billion spent online on Wednesday, up 31.8% from 2017. Thanksgiving Day online sales hit $3.7 billion, a 28% growth year over year. Thanksgiving weekend was the biggest online shopping weekend in American history, as sales reached $6.4 billion.
Total spend for Black Friday weekend is predicted to reach roughly $59.6 billion, according to estimates by GlobalData Retail. That represents an increase of 5.7% from 2017 sales during the same period, Thanksgiving Day to the following Sunday, and the best growth rate in the United States since the post-recession Black Friday boom in 2011.
Over the weekend, Amazon witnessed a record-breaking holiday shopping weekend after the online marketplace saw over 180 million items ordered worldwide. The record sales were made over what is dubbed the “Turkey 5,” the five days starting with Thanksgiving and running through Cyber Monday.
According to Amazon, there were a total of 180 million items ordered during Turkey 5. The company said Echo devices were a hot commodity with the Echo Dot being the #1 selling product on Amazon globally. Other top-selling devices were the Ring Video Doorbell 2, iRobot Roomba, the TP-Link Mini Wi-Fi Smart Plug, and Amazon Smart Plug.
Michelle Obama’s book Becoming was the top seller on Amazon Books and was a top seller on Cyber Monday. Other top sellers included AncestryDNA kits, the Insta Pot 6 Quart, and Bose QuietComfort 25 Acoustic Noise Cancelling Headphones for Apple Devices.
However, the sales explosion created some new problems for retailers, as they lost quite a few sales over sold out and out-of-stock goods. According to Adobe, 3.26% of product pages saw out-of-stock messages on Thanksgiving, costing retailers an estimated $120 million in sales.
Walmart’s technical issues, on the other hand, affected an estimated 3.6 million shoppers, according to LovetheSales.com analysis. The retail aggregator estimates that the tech problems, which lasted about 150 minutes, cost the retailer an estimated $9 million in lost sales.
