A $10.8B Black Friday record and more Cyber Five numbers to know
This year’s Cyber Five saw shoppers spending record billions from their phones and finding new ways to pay.
While some customers might feel like Black Friday has lost its meaning over the years — with fewer lines wrapping around stores at pre-dawn hours — the numbers tell a different story. The flurry of holiday spending has simply changed mediums from brick-and-mortar locations to online stores. What’s more, Cyber Week is longer than ever, stretching from the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Small Business Saturday to Cyber Monday. Target, for example, started its Cyber Monday deals on Sunday.
Lupine Skelly, research lead at Deloitte, said shoppers of all demographics are looking for deals as they tire of higher grocery store prices and rising costs of living. More people are going online to scout the best deals — and it means that online companies like Amazon and Temu continue to gain market share.
“We don’t have huge doorbusters where people are lining up at the doors,” she said. “It’s more about, I’m going to sit back and watch a football game and do some Black Friday Friday shopping.’ And it speaks to the transparency that’s online, and how easy it is for consumers to find the best deals.”
Here’s a look at a few big-number takeaways from how online sales performed this Cyber Five.
$10.8 billion: Black Friday Revenue
Adobe Analytics tracked $10.8 billion in online spending on Black Friday alone, a whopping $1 billion more from last year and the first time it crossed the $10 billion mark in a single day.
This season overall isn’t predicted to be much larger than last year’s — the National Retail Federation predicted growth to hit between 2.5% and 3.5%. But shopping habits continue to shift online, setting new records. At the close of business on Cyber Monday, Adobe expected consumers to spend between $13.2 billion and $13.5 billion, the biggest online shopping day of all time.
While shoppers scoured for deals, they may not have been as large as they expected. Salesforce reported an average 27% discount for online shopping on Black Friday and that about 66% of all carts had a promotion.
Michele Snyder, chief marketing and innovation officer for Image Skincare, said the company intentionally aimed to keep its discounts modest. Its Black Friday sale was 25% off with free shipping, which went up to 30% for Cyber Monday. “For this year, we made a concerted effort to not go higher than everyone else on discounting,” Snyder said. “We see brands trying to stay competitive, but you also have to be careful about eroding your brand value,” she said.
Image also added an eight-piece gift with purchase for shoppers before Black Friday that Snyder said helped performance. “What we really wanted to work in was more value-add,” she said.
So far, the brand is up 50% on sales for Black Friday alone compared to last year, with business-to-business sales outperforming expectations. Image expects similar results on Cyber Monday, Snyder said.
80%: Increase in mobile shopping
Mobile shopping proved to be a key driver of e-commerce holiday spending, buoyed by updates and upgrades brands had put into their apps, websites and marketing strategies. Salesforce found that 80% of online traffic came from mobile starting on Thanksgiving and through at least Sunday Dec. 1.
Eric Girouard, founder and CEO of the footwear brand Brunt Workwear, said the company typically has about 90% of its traffic coming from mobile. “For most of our customer base, their computer is their phone,” he said. In turn, the company leans heavily on SMS marketing, putting out messages to customers about its tiered discounts, free gifts with purchase and limited-edition drops. “It’s always noisy and hard to actually break through, but we give it all we can,” he said.
Already, November has been the biggest month in company history — even before Cyber Five, Girouard said. “In years past, we’ve seen a little dip in the week, week and a half [before Cyber Five] because people are waiting,” he said. “We have yet to see that dip.” On Black Friday, the company made about 85% more than it did the year before.
Skelley from Deloitte noted that this was the first year pure-play online retailers like Amazon and Temu were in the top spot for shopping.
$686.3 million: BNPL’s Black Friday spend
Adobe reported that buy now, pay later companies drove $686.3 million in online spending on Back Friday, a year-over-year increase of 8.8%. That’s expected to ratchet up further on Cyber Monday to more than $990 million, which would mark a 5.6% increase from last year and record BNPL spending in a single day.
Shoppers give varying reasons for wanting to use BNPL services. Adobe found in its pre-holiday survey that about one in five shoppers say they’re using it to free up cash. Another one in five said they were using it to buy something they couldn’t afford otherwise.
Jinal Shah, CMO and GM of shopping and experience at BNPL provider Zip, anticipated the company would see increases in BNPL usage across the Cyber Five stretch. Last year, the company saw a 26% jump in usage on Black Friday alone.
Part of the reason for the jump connects back to how many more people are shopping from mobile — and how many more retailers are adding the BNPL services to checkout. Image Skincare uses Klarna; Brunt Workwear is built on Shopify, which allows people to split payments with Affirm.
Shah from Zip said the convenience of the platforms is one reason they’re growing.
“They don’t think of us as a credit option,” Shah said. “It’s really more around, ‘I have to do all this holiday shopping, and there’s a thing I want to buy for myself and I’m going to leverage the options I have at my fingertips.'”