Black Friday Online Sales Officially Pass $5 Billion

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Sep 26, 1:04PM EDT · Published Nov 25, 11:59AM EST

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Black Friday Online Sales Officially Pass $5 Billion — © courtesy of Amazon.com Inc.

Software firm Adobe, which tracks online holiday sales by day, forecast Black Friday e-commerce sales would top $5 billion. They did. According to Adobe’s survey of 80 of the web’s largest online retailers, Black Friday revenue reached $5.03 billion, up 16.9% from the same day a year ago.

E-commerce sales have risen in double digits most years since The Great Recession. The Adobe figures do not tell much directly about bricks and mortar sales. However, if earnings forecasts from retailers like Macy’s (NYSE: M) and J.C. Penney (NYSE: JCP) are any indication, they are nowhere near the double digit range. As a matter of fact, their same store sales may have fallen.

The Adobe Analytics information showed, in specific:

…a record $5.03 billion was spent online by the end of Black Friday, an increase of 16.9% YoY (Black Friday 2016 totaled $4.3 billion in spend). Black Friday spend is in-line with Adobe’s forecast earlier this month – Adobe predicted $5 billion in spend for Black Friday. The holiday season to date (Nov 1 – Nov 24) shows $38.3 billion in online shopping revenue, 17.8% growth YoY. This is just over Adobe’s prediction by $0.7 billion. The early hours of Small Business Saturday have seen $0.32 billion in online spend (10.0% growth YoY) as of 10am ET. According to a survey Adobe conducted, 49% of shoppers somewhat agree or strongly agree that they will support small business this season; women are slightly more likely than men to agree.

In another blow to traditional retailers, a great deal of the Black Friday shopping was done on smartphones. Smartphones sales delivered 54.3% of visits and 36.9% of revenue for the day. Although Adobe does not track it, one of the most troublesome consumer habits of the last several years is called “showrooming”. Consumers go to stores, find the items they want, and then compare prices online. If the store they have visited to see an item does not have the lowest price, consumers are likely to buy it somewhere else online. Increasingly, that place has become Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN)

Ironically, as e-commerce buying has moved away from computers to smartphones, computers are among the categories with the largest discounts for holiday shoppers. Adobe analytics reports:

As of Black Friday, highest discounts are in computers (discounted 15.9% on average), followed by TVs (down 21.6%) and toys (down 17.3%).

Adobe expects the steep discounts on toys to continue, which will make rough sledding for Toys “R” Us, which recently went bankrupt, and any other retailer which relies on toys for a large portion of its total revenue

As holiday online sales race toward another record year, the fate of bricks and mortar companies becomes more precarious by the day. It is a trend which has been expected. The Adobe research shows how likely the problem is to accelerate

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.