Online shopping experiences huge surge in Black Friday sales
While traditional brick & mortar retailers may be seeing a slump at the registers, e-tailers are scrambling to make sure their websites don’t crash under the weight of a customer surge.
With rising gas prices, it seems people are opting to stay at home and do their shopping from their computers. Add in that a goodly number of online stores offer discounted prices, no sales tax, free shipping incentives and so on, and it’s becoming clear why people may want to shop online instead.
According to ComScore, a leading company for tracking online activity, sales are up across the board for e-tailers so far this holiday season. For November 1 – 23 they show sales were up 17%, November 24th, Thanksgiving in the USA, sales hit a 29% gain, and on the all-important Black Friday, November 25th, sales were up 22%. For the total of November and December, ComScore is predicting an overall gain of 20% for online sales.
With no new game system this year, it’s a bit surprising to see that sales of video game consoles and accessories saw the largest increase with a 134% jump over the previous year. Course, with Amazon selling 1400 Wii’s in just 10 minutes, the evidence is definitely out there to support those numbers. Other increses were seen in categories such as furniture (up 36%), consumer electronics (up 21%), and fitness (up 20%).
All of this bodes well for a huge online shopping season, but only if the companies can keep their websites from crashing. Big box retailers such as Sears and Circuit City saw their sites buckle under the strain on Friday. And on Cyber Monday, the Monday following Black Friday, Yahoo Shopping, one of the biggest online malls, saw it’s shopping cart suffering outages due to increased traffic.
While this boon in online shopping is a wonderful thing, if retailers can’t keep their sites up and running, it won’t matter how good their prices and service are as no one will be able to get to them.
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