Early Black Friday sales data is pointing to a healthy start to the holiday shopping season—at least online.
Online sales reached $70.9 billion globally, an 8% increase from Black Friday last year, according to data from
Salesforce.
Black Friday global online sales were $65.3 billion last year.
In the U.S., online sales increased 9% to $16.4 billion globally, according to the Salesforce data. A Salesforce spokesperson said the figures beat what the company was expecting.
Footwear, health and beauty, skincare, and sporting goods were all high-performing categories this year, Salesforce said.
Shopify,
which counts both online and offline sales from its merchants, said global sales increased 22% year over year to a record $4.1 billion.
The data follows on a solid Thanksgiving Day performance for retailers.
Adobe
estimated that a record $5.6 billion was spent online on Thursday, up 5.5% year over year.
And the shopping weekend isn’t over. Last year, Salesforce saw a total of $281 billion in global online sales and $68 billion in the U.S. across what it calls Cyber Week, the period between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Salesforce projects a 1% increase in Cyber Week online sales this year and a 4% increase globally.
The data doesn’t give a clear picture into what’s happening on the ground at the brick-and-mortar operations of big retailers like
Best Buy,
Target,
Nordstrom,
and
Kohl’s.
Recent earnings from those companies have shown a slowdown in sales.
And the National Retail Federation predicted that total holiday sales growth will slow this year to a rate of 3% to 4%, between $957.3 billion and $966.6 billion. That’d be the smallest increase since 2019 when sales grew 3.8%.
Shoppers are expected to do a lot more of their shopping online this year. A Deloitte study found that 61% of shoppers’ Black Friday budgets will be spent online this year, a two-percentage point increase over last year.
Those purchases are being made on shoppers’ phones. Salesforce said 79% of digital visits to websites this year came from mobile phones, an all-time high in mobile traffic.
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