We"ve already reported that online shopping increased massively for Thanksgiving Day a few days ago, but what about for Black Friday, the single biggest shopping day of the year? This weekend, IBM announced that its data showed a very big jump in online sales.
The press release announcing the news included an infographic, shown below, which claims online spending on retail websites during Black Friday increased by 20.7 percent from 2011. The company came up with its findings via its Smarter Commerce cloud-based analytic service.
People used mobile devices more than ever to shop online during Black Friday 2012. IBM said that 24 percent of online shoppers used some kind of mobile product to access online shopping sites, up from just 14.3 percent in 2011. The iPad was the source of the most online shopping traffic for mobile devices, as 10 percent of all online shopping transactions came from the Apple tablet.
Interestingly, IBM claims that while the average online shopper spent more on Black Friday sales in 2012, they also made their orders more frequently. This was apparently due to shoppers looking for better deals, along with free shipping. As a result, the average online order on Black Friday 2012 was $181.22, down by 4.7 percent. The average number of items per order also went down to 5.6, a decrease of 12 percent compared to 2011.
eBay has also released its own Black Friday 2012 numbers. Those figures show eBay itself had a 153 percent increase in mobile shopping on that day compared to 2011. Its subsidiary PayPal witnessed an 193 percent increase in mobile online transactions on Black Friday 2012 compared to a year ago.
Source: IBM | Image via IBM