Black Friday 2018 Sales Volumes Trending High, May Be Best Season Seen By Retailers In Years
Sales both online and in stores are brisk so far for the 2018 Black Friday extravaganza, and reports suggest that this could end up being the best season for retailers in several years. Some retailers started their sales at the beginning of the week, or even earlier, but all signs point toward the weekend remaining strong. There are high expectations as well as for Cyber Monday and the coming week.
CBS News notes that e-commerce sales by mid-morning on Black Friday had already looked quite impressive. A whopping $643 million had apparently already been spent, representing an increase of 28 percent compared to 2017.
A representative for Amazon said that they were seeing record levels of spending for this Black Friday, and that they were on pace to outperform last year. Shoppers quickly found many online items on various websites to be sold out before they could even get anything in their cart and some sites crashed with the volume of traffic they saw Thursday night.
Not only has the e-commerce side seen impressive numbers for this 2018 Black Friday season, brick-and-mortar retailers are seeing great numbers too. Business Insider notes that this could be the best Black Friday that retailers have seen in years.
The outlet says that GlobalData Retail reveals early projections that suggest that spending will hit $59.6 billion by the end of the weekend. If it does, that’ll be the best growth since 2011 and represent an increase of 5.7 percent versus 2017.
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Not only have online sales looked strong, but it seems that more people have shopped already at this point of the season when compared to last year, and those who have shopped have spent more money. In addition, those who still plan to buy this season are higher in number than at this point last year.
Black Friday has been shifting in recent years, with many retailers starting their sales on Thanksgiving Day or even earlier. Online sales reportedly hit $2.4 billion on Wednesday, the day before the holiday, which is more than 30 percent up from 2017. Another $1.75 billion was spent on Thanksgiving day itself by early evening, another significant increase over last year.
How high will the sales numbers be by the end of Sunday, the end of Black Friday weekend, and how wild will Cyber Monday be? Will these trends continue throughout the rest of the holiday shopping season? All signs point toward this being an exceptional year for both online and brick-and-mortar retailers and shoppers are excited to be finding good deals.
