After an impressive day for online sales on Thanksgiving, Black Friday online shopping appears to be strong as well. According to IBM’s Benchmark service, an ongoing measurement that covers some 500 of the largest online retailers in the U.S., results today indicate a strong Black Friday with 2012 online sales up nearly 24 percent for this same time period over Black Friday 2011.
The number of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site is at 28 percent, up from 18.1 percent in 2011.
The number of consumers using their mobile device to make a purchase is 14.4 percent, up from 10.3 percent in 2011. And consumers took their mobile phone into the store with the iPhone driving more retail shopping than any other device. Current iPhone traffic is at 11.4 percent versus 8.9 percent and 7.9 percent for iPad and Android respectively.
Social shopping is also on the rise today. Shoppers referred from Facebook and Twitter have generated .18 percent of all online sales on Black Friday.
Yesterday, Thanksgiving sales were up 17.8% higher than 2011, with mobile traffic up to 28.5%. More and more retailers are offering online deals in addition to in-store offerings to compete with Amazon and others so it should be interesting to see if online sales jump significantly today from last year.
We’ll update this post with the numbers released later today.
UPDATE: As of 11 am PST, PayPal is already seeing almost a 3-fold increase (190%) in global mobile payment volume on Black Friday 2012 compared to the same time period on Black Friday 2011.
