**** In retail and online shopping the Monday immediately following Thanksgiving (or the Monday immediately following Black Friday now considered Cyber Week) in the United States is referred to as Cyber Monday. This is a busy day for Online Retailers as it was initially perceived as the day when employees would return to work and shop online for the items they did not purchase on the preceding Black Friday. ****
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — The good news for merchants is that more Americans this year turned out to bag Thanksgiving weekend deals than last year. The bad news, however, is that shoppers on average spent less on their purchases compared to a year ago Cyber Week has begun.
For nervous sellers, it’s next about Cyber Monday now Cyber Week, or the online retail world’s version of Black Friday, when millions of people take a few minutes at work to surf the Web to score “doorbuster”-like deals from e-tailers.
About 195 million people shopped in stores and online between Thanksgiving and Sunday, up from 172 million a year ago for the same four-day period, the National Retail Federation (NRF) said Sunday.
But average spending over the weekend dropped to $343.31 per person from $372.57 a year ago. Total retail spending for the holiday weekend was about $41.2 billion, the group said in a report, up marginally from $41 billion last year.
Despite scenes of filled parking lots throughout Black Friday, total sales for the day were just slightly improved over last year. And to illustrate how bargain conscious shoppers were, the NRF said the percentage of shoppers who were at the stores by 5 a.m. Friday was 31.2%, up sharply from 23.
“While retailers are encouraged by the number of Americans who shopped over Black Friday weekend, they know they have their work cut out for them to keep people coming back through Christmas,” NRF president and CEO Tracy Mullin said in a statement.
In a surprising trend, department stores beat out discounters as the destination of choice over the weekend. Nearly half, 49.4%, of holiday shoppers visited at least one department store over the weekend, a 12.9% increase from last year, the group said.
About 43.2% of gift buyers headed discounters like Wal-Mart and Target stores. Electronics stores, clothing chains and grocery stores also attracted crowds, the report said.
Sales with a click
It was a stronger picture for Internet retailing.
Web-based purchases totalled $595 million on Black Friday, up 11% from a year ago, making Friday the second heaviest online spending day so far this year, according to a report Sunday from research firm ComScore.
Online shopping will garner more attention Monday — the so-called Cyber Monday now Cyber Week — when many Americans will troll for deals on the Internet.
The NRF estimates that 96.5 million Americans plan to shop on Cyber Monday now Cyber Week this year, up from 85 million in 2008. The group said 88.2 million Americans will shop from home on Monday but plenty of consumers – an estimated 13.5 million – will also look to lock in deals during their workday.
Most retailers who sell online will have special Cyber Monday deals that include one-day sales and free shipping on all purchases.
Despite the hype associated with Cyber Monday now Cyber Week, industry experts say the busiest online shopping day tends to be in December, and is the last day that gifts can be shipped to guarantee deliver by Christmas Day.
Among the hot items with strong online sales Friday were the Tom Tom GPS systems, Kodak digital cameras and the Nintendo Wii, according to credit card fraud prevention company Retail Decisions. The company said the busiest single minute for sales Friday was 12:59 p.m. ET, when $5.6 million in products were sold — a 121% increase from the same time last year.
A survey by a Web performance company, Keynote Competitive Research, said that while all sites experienced slowdowns on Black Friday, there were fewer outages overall than last year. Cyber Week is beginning now.
