Away from the pre-dawn shuffle toward the big-box stores and the mall’s frenetic crush, e-commerce reaped a record-breaking
harvest during Black Friday.
According to Nielsen//NetRatings’ Holiday eShopping Index increased 12 percent from home on the day
after Thanksgiving.
That’s a unique audience of 19.2 million across more than 120
representative online retailers, compared with 17.2 million on Black
Friday last year.
Internet auctions giant eBay led the top online shopping destinations
on Black Friday with 7.5 million unique visitors. Amazon and Wal-Mart
Stores followed with 3.4 million and 3.2 million unique visitors,
respectively.
Media metrics firm comScore said the high unique
audience numbers led to high revenues for e-commerce sites, as well.
ComScore reports that the first 24 days of November had already
reached $8.31 billion, a 23-percent increase over last year, according to its data on consumer online non-travel spending at U.S. sites.
But Black Friday brought an even bigger jump, comScore said, with
$434 million spent, up 42 percent over last year.
That Black Friday bump was evident across e-commerce, but week-over-week growth was particularly strong for consumer electronics,
Nielsen//NetRatings said.
That product category increased 211 percent
in unique audience from Nov. 17 to Nov. 24.
And some are even saying that last Friday won’t be the biggest
e-commerce day of the year.
According to Web research firm CoreMetrics, today, often called “Cyber
Monday,” will see the highest traffic this season and next Monday,
Dec. 4, will yield the most sales for Internet commerce.
Given the good numbers, CoreMetrics predicts that the 2006
overall e-commerce holiday retail sales will increase 16 percent over
last year’s holiday season.
And all of it without a mall or a big box store in site. Just you and
your quiet cup of coffee.