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Thanksgiving weekend has long been viewed as the traditional start of the most important sales period for retailers, and so far, the indication is that we’re in for a strong e-commerce holiday season. Salesforce tracks activity in real time and just released its first numbers for today. It says that as of 2pm ET, online sales were up 7% globally and 4% in the US compared to 2023, generating $15.6 billion and $3.1 billion in sales, respectively.
By comparison, last year saw a Thanksgiving slowdown when it came to online shopping. Salesforce said the entire day generated $31.7 billion in online sales, while the United States saw $7.5 billion in sales. Each rose by only 1%.
Salesforce said its 2024 numbers are based on shopping data from 1.5 billion consumers captured across its customers and other data feeds in Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. You can see more here.
We’ll update this post later with more numbers, including ones from Adobe, which also tracks online sales. Adobe Analytics last year He said On Thanksgiving, people in the United States spent $5.6 billion online, which represents an increase of only 5.5% from the previous year.
The economy is still already shaky in many markets, so retailers are sweetening the deal to get shoppers to part with their money. Discounts average 24% globally and 27% in the United States
Thanksgiving Day has become a major day for mobile shopping in the United States. Most physical stores are closed, and many people are with friends and family, so people are using their phones as a more accurate way to get sale items.
Salesforce predicts that the strongest buying period will be in the evening, after eating, with 35% of all sales occurring between 7pm and midnight. Thanksgiving is also expected to be the biggest mobile shopping day of the week overall, with 73% of all sales made today expected to be on mobile devices.
The Internet has exploded when it comes to holiday shopping. Black Friday was a uniquely American shopping phenomenon, coming right after Thanksgiving and the start of the holiday shopping season.
Now, not only can you find “Black Friday” sales events around the world (since there is no Thanksgiving Day except for syndicated showings of American TV specials), but those and other holiday sales days are beginning to be lumped together as “Internet Week.” , which starts days before you carve any turkey or pumpkin.
Salesforce marked Tuesday of this week as the start of Cyber Week, and said sales rose 7% and 14%, respectively, globally and in the United States.
It sometimes feels like we’ve reached a stagnant period in innovation when it comes to e-commerce, but generative AI may have something to say about that. Salesforce said the use of digital agents and GenAI by retailers was up 32% compared to last week.
Salesforce clearly sees a business opportunity in building these AI bells and whistles, so that may be why they’re teasing these specific details. “32% increase” doesn’t tell us how many AI tools actually have — let alone how helpful they are for sales conversions, or whether they’ve led to people fleeing sites out of frustration. We’ll have to see if more tangible statistics are achieved this year.
“Holiday shopping momentum has been building throughout Cyber Week with online traffic and sales surging. After waiting all year for the best deals of the season, shoppers are finally ready to make their holiday purchases,” Kayla Schwartz, director of consumer insights at Salesforce, said in a statement. They stream their favorite sites via their mobile devices.”
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