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From Home Furnishing Business
Black Friday Bulletin Highlights Online Bonus for Retailers
November 26,
2023 by HFBusiness Staff in Business Strategy, Industry 
Welcome to Cyber Monday. According to Reuters, this year’s sales from Black Friday were positive especially for those consumers who did their shopping online. They were able to shop and compare and then ultimately spend.
Holiday shoppers in the U.S. are seeking out the best deals and strategically nabbing the deepest discounts ahead of Cyber Monday, according to data from retailer websites aggregated by third parties.
Cyber Monday, the first Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday, is set to be the biggest U.S. online shopping day of the year as merchants have stepped up online promotions.
Strong online traffic on Black Friday demonstrated a notable pattern of shoppers putting time and effort into selecting the lowest-cost, best-value merchandise, said Rob Garf, vice president and general manager for retail at Salesforce, which tracks data flowing through its Commerce Cloud e-commerce service.
Despite an earlier start to retailers' holiday promotions this year, there weren't a lot of great deals initially, Garf said. Yet "consumers were patient, diligent, and they played a game of discount chicken. And they won once again."
On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, retailers "stepped up the discounting" to roughly 30% on average in the U.S., he said. And "consumers clicked the buy button," spending $16.4 billion online in the U.S. and $70.9 billion globally that day, according to Salesforce.
"We saw a big spike," Garf said, adding that the strong Black Friday online outlay would "pull up" the overall tally for the entire Cyber Week, which started on Tuesday and ends on Monday
On Cyber Monday, Salesforce expects to see discounts averaging 30% again. The risk for consumers, however, is that products may not be available if they wait, he said.
Salesforce says it derives its benchmarks for online traffic and spending from data flowing through its Commerce Cloud e-commerce service, which it says provides a window into the behavior of 1.5 billion people in 60 countries traversing thousands of e-commerce sites. Other firms use different measurements to gauge online shopping patterns.
Rival Adobe Analytics forecasts that shoppers will spend a record $12 billion Monday, 5.4% more than last year, representing what it says will be the largest-ever e-commerce shopping day in the U.S. Retailers are set to dangle average price cuts of 30% on electronics, and 19% on furniture, said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights.
Last-minute shoppers on Monday could spend $4 billion between 6 - 11 p.m. ET alone, Pandya said, "because consumers are going to be concerned about discounts weakening after that."
Mastercard, which measures retail sales across all forms of payment, said e-commerce sales rose 8.5% on Black Friday, while in-store sales rose 1%.
"Digital grew dramatically during the pandemic and then it had a reversion to the mean, when people went back to stores," said Steve Sadove, senior adviser for Mastercard and former CEO of Saks Inc. "Now you are seeing an acceleration in digital, once again. It’s becoming more important."