E-Commerce Sees Big Black Friday
According to numbers released by comScore, spending on online retail sites soared high on Black Friday this year, seeing 42% growth over last year’s post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy.
Figures in the comScore reports indicate that consumer non-travel retail spending online saw a 23% jump over the first 24 days of November 2006 compared to the same span of time in November 2005. More specifically, the first 24 days of November 2006 realized $8.31 billion in non-travel online spending, compared to $6.75 billion spent by consumers in the non-travel sector during the same time period last year.
Traffic to online shopping sites was 21% more than the typical traffic seen to these sites on other November days.
Numbers from Nielsen//NetRatings’ Holiday eShopping Index shows a more muted 12% increase in visits to online retail sites. This year’s Black Friday drew 19.2 million unique visitors to the 120 online retail sites represented on the index, which compares favorably to last year’s unique audience of 17.2 million.
In terms of the number of unique visitors on Friday, November 24 compared to the visitors on Friday, November 17, consumer electronics saw the largest growth with a 211% increase week-over-week. Apparel, home and garden, shopping comparison/portals, beauty, and computer hardware/software also saw big growth in terms of week-over-week growth this year.
EBay received the largest unique audience on Black Friday this year with a total of 7.5 million visitors. Best Buy, however, had the largest increase in the size of its unique audience, with a week-over-week growth of 316% and a total unique audience of 1.7 million on Black Friday.
Concerning the day before Black Friday (otherwise known as Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart saw the majority of visits, with an 18.26% market share this year, referring to a list of 100 retail sites used on an index tracked by Hitwise. Best Buy, Amazon.com, Circuit City, and Target round out the top five.
Hitwise reported that online visits to retail sites increased 33.9% compared to Thanksgiving Day of 2004. This seems to indicate that consumers used the Internet to research Black Friday deals and events.
Big Web sites like Amazon and Wal-Mart experienced downtime and outages due to the enormous number of visitors they received on Black Friday.
Source:
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