With a 15 percent jump in online sales this year compared to 2015, one could definitely say that bargain hunters in the U.S. are trending away from the high street, with total online sales breaking the $1 billion mark according to Adobe Digital Index.
The election of Donald J Trump as President of the United States seems to have given the economy a short-term boost at least, as the shopping season kicked off with over a billion dollars worth of online transactions by hard spending consumers.
E-commerce titan Amazon.com Inc has been one of the main beneficiaries of the loosened purse strings this Black Friday, but online shopping outlets offer steep discounts all year round, a fact that has hit traditional brick-and-mortar establishments hard.
High street retailers are now offering their own online deals weeks in advance of Thanksgiving and they are opening on the holiday to try and compete with their big online rivals.
“It’s been an immense day for our online sales, one of the best we’ve ever seen,” says Target CEO Brian Cornell. He told reporters on Friday evening that online sales had grown by double-digits without going into specifics.
Retailers are desperate to attract shoppers over the November to December holiday period as this timeframe accounts for as much as half their yearly sales, and is traditionally the time when they start turning a profit. Some say the term Black Friday comes from the change from red to black on their balance sheets.
Sales are projected to expand by around 3.5 percent this year, according to the National Retail Federation, as retailers offer up to 80 percent discounts on popular items, and total sales look set to break $700 billion.
Retail shares are performing well and have attracted a recent influx of investment according to Japanese firm CITIC Tokyo International who prepares reports on the country’s outgoing capital to the U.S.
The U.S. has around 5,000 online retail stores with 20 billion visits per year.
“The holiday shopping season it most assuredly not what it once was,” says BJ's Wholesale Club Inc CFO Baldwin. “You now have thousands of online stores offering discounts in a 3 or 4-month arc around the big holidays. Large high street chains are going to have to adapt or die I’m afraid.”
The decline in brick-and-mortar shopping this year was observed by a team of 18 people deployed by retail consultancy Customer Growth Partners.
