Mobile Plays Big Role in US Black Friday Sales

Mobile played a big role in this year’s Black Friday sales in the US as nearly 47 per cent of online traffic coming via mobile devices as online retail sales registered 8 per cent increase from last year.

The holiday shopping season certainly started earlier this year, with a number of retailers online and off running discounted sales beginning on Thanksgiving Day. Amazon, for example, started running deals on its site mid-day, and that choice seemed to work out well for the retailer.

Amazon was up 25.9% year-over-year, outpacing e-commerce as a whole, but eBay grew just 3.0% over Thanksgiving Day 2013. Mobile this year also played a part in crashing Best Buy’s website.

Online sales were up 8.5% over the same period on Black Friday 2013, it found. Though mobile didn’t claim over half of online traffic as it did on Thursday, its percentage of the online sales is steadily increasing. This Black Friday, mobile sales accounted for 26.1% of all online sales, an increase of 24.7% year-over-year.

Also continuing Black Friday trends, iOS shoppers remained more valuable to retailers with an average order size of $127.34 – higher than Android, at $101.82. iOS also sent more traffic than Android with 31.8% of all online traffic versus 14.5% on Android. And finally, Apple iOS sales accounted for 20.2% of total online sales, nearly four times that of Android, which drove only 5.6% of all online sales.