Now that your joyous Thanksgiving weekend with friends and family is behind us, it’s time to take a few moments to review the significant sales data associated with this holiday. We created this post for the purpose of providing you with the highlights of this most sacred shopping weekend in the American consumer calendar. In addition, we’ll go over the nitty gritty details that are likely to impact your eCommerce business as the holiday season progresses. This year’s online Black Friday sales have smashed records and set the bar for the future of post-turkey day sales.
The numbers featured below are aggregate for both Thursday (Thanksgiving) and Friday (Black Friday) 2017 online sales. Cyber Monday is generally considered to be its own “holiday” so to speak, therefore it’s sales figures are counted separately.
2017 sales as we receive them. Updated as of 12/3/2017!
- Black Friday: $7.9 Billion.
- Cyber Monday: (Projected) $6.6 Billion. (That’s a 94.7% increase YoY and counting…)
- 5 day total (Thursday – Monday): $19.62 Billion
- BF+CM 5 day cart abandonment total: $24 Billion
For comparison, here are the aggregate online sales figures for the 2016 shopping weekend.
- Black Friday: $5.27 billion.
- Cyber Monday: $3.39 billion.
Editor’s Note: The figures presented here are subject to change as new information is released. We will amend this post as newer data become available.
According to Adobe Analytics, online spending on Black Friday increased by 17.9% over 2016. This marks an amazing year-over-year (YoY) growth rate for eCommerce retailers both big and small. In fact, at the height of this year’s Black Friday sales, shoppers were placing an incredible 2,800 orders per minute, and spending at a rate of an astonishing $1 million dollars every 60 seconds.
As amazing as the sales figures and YoY growth rate are, they don’t address the 800-pound Gorilla taking selfies in the corner of the room – what devices did consumers use to complete their purchases this year?
The Post – Sales Analysis:
In relation to the previous section, let’s start by asking ourselves the following questions: What can we learn from this year’s sales data? What are the takeaways that really matter to those of us in the world of eCommerce? In a nutshell: Purchases made from smartphones are having a huge impact on sales. The Gorilla we mentioned earlier just nodded in agreement. Did we mention that he did all of his shopping from his smartphone while updating his followers about the best deals on Bananas?
Let’s start by looking at the key figures as they relate to mobile sales data.
- 61% of all web traffic came from mobile devices.
- 42% of all sales were completed on a smartphone.
- 26% of all revenue came from smartphones.
- The Average Order Value (AOV): $132 dollars.
Desktops and Laptops deserve an honorable mention, as 49% of all online sales were completed on them. However, 2017 marks the first year in the modern (personal computing) era that these devices accounted for just less than half of all online Black Friday sales.
Moving on, let’s take a look at the AOV for smartphones, per operating system.
- iOS: $127
- Android: $112
This year, iOS purchases increased by 17% over 2016. Android only experienced a slight increase of 1.5%. Overall, the Conversion Rate (CVR) for iOS users stands at 3.2% during this time of year.
What does this really mean? It means that, if you have an eCommerce website not optimized for mobile shopping and checkout, you are missing out on BIG revenue. The figures for Q4 won’t be available until after New Years. However, on a more positive point, online retailers have managed to make $33.26 billion in revenue since the start of November. In addition to those sales, the National Retail Foundation (NRF) estimates that 115 million Americans went shopping on Black Friday – both online and at brick-and-mortar stores. To top it all off, shoppers are expected to spend an incredible $107.4 billion online by the end of the holiday shopping season.
Based on this information, we can say with a high degree of certainty that there is significant revenue to be made by those who are prepared for the wave of shopper traffic to their website between now and the end of Q4.
Strengthening Your CVR Ground Game In Time For The Shoppers
So, now that you understand what shoppers are are up to this holiday season, what can be done to strengthen your ground game? Your aim should be to maximize the experience of the visitor traffic coming to your website from mobile devices. What exactly do we mean by “maximize the experience”? Visitors should have a smooth experience while shopping on your website from their smartphone. A browsing experience optimized for smartphones, coupled with a simple, clean, checkout process, will likely result in a higher CVR for your business. Taking the time to make these improvements now will provide strong momentum for your eCommerce business going into 2018 – especially if you are gathering insightful data about your customers. Which brings us to our next point.
Staying Ahead of the Curve
Another important development is that in a recent survey of eCommerce marketers, 70% said that they believed the customer data they have been working with is low quality, and that they will be making significant investments in platforms that are capable of providing higher quality data over the next 12 – 18 months. These marketers are specifically looking to implement solutions to gather User, Site, and Product (USP) data on their customers. Current clients of the Datacrushers revenue discovery platform are already ahead of the curve. The Datacrushers platforms smart mix of Machine Learning and AI gathers this data for our clients from the moment it is integrated with their eCommerce site. Merchants (and their marketing teams) can quickly use this data to segment their shoppers, create action based campaigns and smartly re-target both logged in and guest shoppers who are not logged in through omnichannel campaigns. Datacrushers revenue discovery platform identifies 70-80% more revenue abandoners and can increase merchants sales by up to 40%!
Datacrushers
Disrupting the status-quo, Datacrushers is fundamentally changing the way online merchants use real shopper analytics to boost revenues and improve client lifetime value. Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Datacrushers is a technology and platform agnostic tool designed for rapid go to market deployment across any language and currency. Datacrushers enables revenue growth by the use machine learning and artificial intelligence to mine real user, site and product data into actionable analytics to drive highly targeted and personalized multichannel campaigns both on and off-site.
