Money spent by a huge number of customers throughout the Thanksgiving and Black Friday events inched up this year, according to global media measurement and analytics firm comScore.
The company disclosed in a report that e-commerce spending on Thanksgiving Day notched $1.096 billion — the second year that shoppers have overtaken the one billion dollar mark. The increase from last year's total spending rose by 9 percent. A year ago, the reported overall spending was $1.009 billion.
"Thanksgiving has established itself as one of the more important online buying days," says comScore chairman emeritus Gian Fulgoni.
In the meantime, Black Friday spending via Internet went up as well. The figure improved from $1.505 billion last year to $1.656 billion this year.
It is worth noting that half of the website traffic Amazon documented during the Black Friday event originated from mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones.
Fulgoni adds that comScore is looking forward to seeing upwards of $2.5 billion in desktop spending since this is the time that folks are going back to their work computers following the Thanksgiving weekend. Fulgoni says customers may continue on obtaining items during some of their downtime.
Based on the research carried out by the National Retail Federation, 151 million U.S. consumers, equivalent to over half of all customers in the U.S., made a purchase on Black Friday. These consumers spent around $299 each person during the event.
It is said that the change in buyers' habit to buy products from physical to online retailers has brought the decline in aggressive clashes which often take place during Black Friday events in the past years. A stampede occurred in 2008, where one Walmart employee in Long Island, New York passed away. There was also a fight inside of Kohl's in Tustin, California last year. Since 2008, seven individuals died and nearly 100 people have sustained injuries.
In the meantime, a separate study conducted by Adobe shows that one-third of the online shoppers made their purchase via mobile devices.
