November 27, 2006
When Black Friday comes…and goes
With turkey time over in the US, the first results are in for online shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend.
Black Friday, normally a day for mass offline shopping when bricks-and-mortar retailers finally enter the black, saw a 42 per cent increase in online sales volume on last year to $434m, according to comScore Networks.
High traffic caused an outage on Wal-Mart’s site as shoppers sought to avoid “mayhem at the malls.”
However, Nielsen/Net Ratings reported traffic to retail sites was up a more modest 12 per cent on last year, with eBay the top destination, followed by Amazon and Wal-Mart.
The disparity could be explained by shoppers buying big-ticket items such as high-definition televisions – Nielsen said the consumer electronics category received a 211 per cent boost in visits on the previous week.
Today is the retailers’ conceit known as Cyber Monday. While Amazon is ignoring it, Google is plugging its Checkout product - adding merchants, charity donations and promotions to a new holidays website.
Checkout could certainly use a boost - none of the top-ten e-tailers recorded by Nielsen use the service, according to the listings on the new site.
Chris Nuttall, San Francisco
