2018 was already predicted to be a massive year for online shopping, thanks to many businesses shifting to e-commerce entirely. Online stores do not incur as many costs to run as brick and mortar stores do. These factors contributed to the $3.5 billion revenue predicted via online shopping during this Thanksgiving season.
Thanksgiving is a day of celebrating peace, traditionally speaking. These days it has become synonymous with the biggest sales of the year. That’s is why everyone is spending their time online hunting for the best deals, rather than spending time with their families and friends.
At 2 pm Pacific Time, $1.75 billion was spent online, up from $406 million at 7 am. This represented an increase of 28.6 percent and 23.2 percent respectively over the same periods in 2017. These figures were provided by Adobe, which compiles real-time data for e-commerce sales.
Adobe tracks e-commerce transactions across 80 of the top 100 US online retailers and says its analytics are based on over 1 trillion visits to retail sites and 55 million Stock Keeping Units. Adobe has figured that at this rate today’s sales would reach a whopping $3.5 billion.
This will be 0.4 billion higher than the prediction made a month ago. The sales reached $2.9 billion last year, which is still a pretty huge sum. If you thought this was a huge amount, wait till you hear the next figure.
Internet Retailer predicts that $21.6 billion that will be spent over the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. And as always the biggest cow will bring in the most cash. In this case, this is Amazon, to nobody’s surprise.
Amazon is predicted to contribute one-third of all the sales. Despite such enormous figures, online shopping remains to be a niche industry. E-commerce business only accounts for ten to twenty percent of overall retail sales.
This number has remained pretty consistent over the years despite several conventional stores switching over to digital platforms. Statistics from eMarketer show that overall US holiday sales will be over $1 trillion this year.
E-commerce will contribute to approximately around 12 percent of all sales which only equals to $123 billion. People still prefer the old school method of going to stores and checking out items in the store, especially if they are clothes or shoes. Plus it makes for a realistic experience.
Online shopping via smartphones has seen big growth as well. So far, smartphones are responsible for 48.4 percent of all e-commerce site visits but just 28.2 percent of the total sales. Many people find it convenient to open their phones and check out the biggest sales they can find on the internet.
So PCs remain the preferred method of shopping. PCs were responsible for fewer site visits (43.4%) but had far greater final sales (62.3%). Whereas tablets only bring in eight percent in both visitors and sales numbers.
Black Friday used to be just a one-day thing, but now these sales start earlier and can last for a week. This is a reason why sales figures have steadily gone up each year.
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Areen Zahra
Dr. Hafsa Akbar Ali
