I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving Holiday. Thanksgiving was late this year, being the 26th of November, which means we are now fully into the 2009 Holiday shopping season.
According to comScore, this year's Black Friday brought in $595 million in U.S. online holiday spending, up 11% versus Black Friday 2008. comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni stated “The $595 million in online spending this Black Friday represents the second heaviest online spending day of the season-to-date and a double-digit increase from last year. While this acceleration in spending suggests the online holiday season may be shaping up slightly more optimistically than anticipated, it may also reflect the heavy discounting and creative promotions being put forth by retailers that now encompass the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter."
Five retail properties surpassed four million U.S. unique visitors on Black Friday, with each of these producing gains over last year. Amazon sites was the most visited retail property, followed closely by Walmart. Apple.com Worldwide sites was third, Target and Best Buy sites rounded out the top five.
The hottest products this year on Black Friday where Tom Tom GPS systems, Kodak digital cameras and the Nintendo Wii who took the No. 1, 2, and 3 spot, respectively, according to credit card fraud prevention company Retail Decisions.
Today is Cyber Monday which is supposedly the biggest online shopping day of the year, so we'll have to see how it does compared to Friday. So far it is a very encouraging start for online sales. A survey conducted for Shop.org by BIGresearch suggests that 96.5 million Americans plan to shop online today, up from 85 million in 2008.
From now till the end of the year I'll be writing about some of the interesting and unique holiday promotions that I come in contact with. I'm going to especially focus on those that I would define as a Social SweepsTM promotion, one that includes at least one social media platform to generate buzz. So stay tuned and if you have any that you want to pass my way, please do. Let the shopping begin!
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