by 
Updated on December 10, 2021
Black Friday hit record online sales this year, totaling $3.34 billion. However, that sales figure was soon broken by the highest Cyber Monday sales ever. Monday online sales figures totalled $3.45 billion. Geekwire reports that it’s also the biggest online shopping day in history, period.
The infographic below shows that Thanksgiving’s also gained some sales attention. (Update: link dead)
Some other shopping observations:
- Amazon took 31% of all online sales over the Thanksgiving weekend, beating all others by a mile. Best Buy (7.4%), Target (4.4%), and Wal-Mart (4.1%) were the runners-up.
- The share of smartphone sales continues to grow. Though speaking for myself, I’d rather do shopping on a desktop or laptop instead of my phone.
- The number of online shoppers this weekend’s eclipsed those going to brick-and-mortar stores, according to Fortune. That’d keep with last year’s Black Friday numbers.
While I couldn’t find overall Black Friday weekend totals, it seems the traditional in-store Black Friday shopping’s still declining in importance. Online shopping’s become the dominant means of shopping. Also, more stores are open on Thanksgiving itself, making the day after less important.
As for what’s sold well this weekend, the five best-selling electronics were:
- Sony’s Playstation 4
- Microsoft’s Xbox One
- Samsung brand 4K TVs
- Apple iPads
- Amazon’s Fire tablet
I’d note that Amazon put its lower-end Fire tablets on sale at a very low price. Video games and game systems, of course, are always popular. And 4K TVs are becoming more and more popular, despite a still-low amount of content. (Though there’s future-proofing, I suppose.)
“Black Friday Shopping 2011” by Clotee Pridgen Allochuku is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (Flickr / cropped from original)
(Updated 8/28/21)
