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The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online that day — appears to have continued into Black Friday, with a bang. Adobe He said that US consumers made a record number of purchases worth $10.8 billion, an increase of 10.2% from last year. Meanwhile, Sales force It gives a much higher overall estimate of spending: $17.5 billion spent in the United States, up 7% year over year. Globally, Salesforce said it also reached a new high: $74.4 billion spent in a 24-hour period, up 5% from last year.
By comparison, in 2023, Adobe said Black Friday online spending in the US was $9.8 billion, and Salesforce said global spending was $70.9 billion.
Another bit of context: The numbers we’re seeing for Black Friday in the US are a small bump compared to the growth as they track it US Census Bureau. It said e-commerce spending in the most recent quarter (Q3) amounted to just over $300 billion, an increase of between 6% and 8% from the same period last year. The lower growth rate globally may be due to the fact that despite the best marketing efforts of e-commerce companies, Black Friday is not actually a holiday in the rest of the world as it is in marketing in the United States.
“Crossing the $10 billion mark is a huge milestone for e-commerce on Black Friday, for a day that in the past was more geared toward in-store shopping,” Vivek Pandya, senior analyst at Adobe Digital Insight, said in a statement. “And with consumers feeling more comfortable with everything from mobile shopping to chatbots, we have tailwinds that can support online growth going forward into Black Friday.”
These numbers are closely followed because this week is usually the beginning of the holiday sales season, which is the most important period for retailers around the world.
At its peak between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. ET, Black Friday holiday sales deals were snapped up at a rate of $11.3 million spent every minute, Adobe said. Sales rates are the latest in real-time data, with Shopify and Stripe also getting in on the action with futuristic animations that look like… Spaceship console And a Power generator. This is one way to add more excitement to the world of analytics.
The two companies have different methodologies. 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. Adobe says its data is based on 1 trillion visits tracked to retail sites in the United States, covering about 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories in total.
Some highlights:
- Adobe said 55% of all online spending was made on mobile devices, amounting to $5.9 billion, up 12.1 year over year.
- Discounts continue to drive sales. Unsurprisingly, the highest discounts were on categories that people are most likely to buy as early holiday gifts. Games are discounted by up to 27.8%; Electronics 27.4% and televisions 24.2%.
- Chatbots continue to emerge as a topic. Adobe said that traffic to retail sites from GenAI chatbots was up 1,800% last year, though you have to remember that it was much rarer, and less functional, last year. Adobe said that in its survey of 5,000 US consumers, 20% said they use chatbots to find deals and other shopping recommendations. Whether chatbot creators take advantage of this to create ads will be an interesting development worth watching. In the meantime, this certainly points to another way chatbots threaten to upend discovery through search engines.
We will update this story as we learn more.
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