Black Friday Online Spending Up 16%, Facebook Influence Rises

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 27, 5:46PM EDT · Published Nov 27, 4:24PM EST

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Online spending rose much more than expected on Black Friday. Should the trend continue, holiday 2010 sales may be stronger than expected, especially if e-commerce is a proxy for overall retail activity.

comScore expected online sales to rise 12% this year. However, according to Coremetrics’ Third Annual Black Friday Benchmark Report, “Online sales were up a healthy 15.9 percent, with consumers pushing the average order value (AOV) up from $170.19 to $190.80 for an increase of 12.1 percent.”

Luxury Goods Make a Comeback: Jewelry retailers reported a 17.6 percent increase in sales. These affluent shoppers appear very willing to open their wallets.

Surgical Shopping: Consumers know what they want and where to get it. People are viewing 18.0 percent fewer products on sites than they did last year, suggesting that they are shopping with a specific item in mind and quickly moving on.

Social Shopping: Consumers appear increasingly savvy about their favorite brands’ social presence, and are turning to their networks on social sites for information about deals and inventory levels. While the percentage of visitors arriving from social network sites is fairly small relative to all online visitors—nearly 1 percent—it is gaining momentum, with Facebook dominating the space.

Aside from the unexpected surge, the data show just how much Facebook has changed the world of e-commerce. It now carries one-quarter of all online display ad space, and these units are sold at a sharp discount to the amount charged by the three major online portals and other large sites. The low cost of Facebook advertising likely pressuring display spending across the internet.

Facebook now is becoming a major influence on holiday sales as its tens of millions of members share information about products and deals with one another.

This may be the first retail season in which social media begins to take away some of the power of large online e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com where shoppers go for both purchases and opinions about gifts.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.