Initial figure said that sales made online were up by an estimated 21.5 percent over last year’s numbers.
The first wave of data from Black Friday is now making its way over and what it has indicated was that mobile shopping took off on that day and was used considerably more than it was on the same day in 2014.
IBM has released its figures from the m-commerce use this year and showed that apps are paying off.
The tech company’s figures showed that when compared to last year, there was an increase of 21.5 percent in digital sales through mobile shopping. This indicates that retailers that invested in improvements in their mobile commerce apps and optimized websites saw the fruits of their efforts. While IBM has revealed the growth rates, it does not report on the total sales figures that occurred on this opening day of the holiday shopping season. That said, on the evening of Black Friday, Adobe reported that Americans were on track to spend over $2.7 billion in online purchases.
If Adobe was correct, it would mean that there would actually have been a 14 percent mobile shopping increase.
That growth in m-commerce would have been over Adobe’s own tracking methods compared to the figures that it gathered on the same day last year. That said, both IBM and Adobe agreed that mobile shoppers were using their smartphones and tablets to make purchases more often than on their laptops and desktops. This represents the first time this has ever happened on Black Friday.
According to Tamara Gaffney, an Adobe analyst, “US consumers have turned into digital shopping ninjas.” Adobe has also estimated that the total spending from American consumers online over Thursday and Friday of last week came to a record total of $4.45 billion. It stated that it would be updating its reports to include in-store sales as well.
Adobe’s report indicated that online and mobile shopping consumers were looking primarily for gadgets and the hottest toy products. Among the most popular Black Friday buys were the iPad Air 2, Xbox, Samsung TVs, Star Wars Lego, Lego Dimension sets, and Shopkin Dolls.
For instance, the mobile app has been designed to make it possible for shoppers to be able to browse a map of the store in which they are currently standing, in order to be able to discover where the Black Friday sales are situated in relation to their current physical location. The hope is that this will help to reduce some of the confusion that consumers face in trying to navigate the stores to find the sales, particularly on the busiest shopping days of the year.