Online Sales on Black Friday Grow to 79 Billion US Dollars
While some doubt the discounts on Black Friday, shopping was still brisk. Sales were also AI-driven.
Store opening on Black Friday
(Image: Powhusku CC-BY-SA 2.0)
The CRM solutions provider Salesforce observed worldwide online sales of 79 billion US dollars for the past Black Friday. This corresponds to a growth of six percent compared to the previous year. In the USA, only three percent of sales were added, with 18 billion dollars generated there.
This is reported by the US business magazine Forbes in an analysis of numerous sources. Adobe identified the peak of purchases, offering market research through its Adobe Analytics division. Between 10 AM and 2 PM on the past Friday, online shoppers in the USA spent an average of 12 million dollars per minute.
Eightfold Growth in AI Access
Both companies, Adobe and Salesforce, also measured how often customers reached shops via AI tools. Adobe observed a growth of 805 percent compared to the previous year. Salesforce addresses sales through AI: 14.2 billion worldwide, and 3 billion in the USA. This confirms the trend that many people no longer use search engines or price comparison portals, but directly use chatbots or similar tools to search for information.
Videos by heise
At least in the USA, Black Friday is still an event in the physical world: the queues before store opening on the day after Thanksgiving are tradition. However, according to Forbes, the picture is not uniform. The market observers from Pass_by, specialized in retail, saw a growth of 1.7 percent. 53 million store visits were evaluated for this. Particularly strong, at 7.9 percent, were the visits to large department stores. Pass_by interprets this as an indication that one-stop shopping is becoming popular again.
Brick-and-Mortar Retail Difficult to Assess
The market researchers from RetailNext contradict this data. According to them, there were 3.6 percent fewer store visits in the USA than in the previous year. However, this says nothing yet about the sales achieved and the proportion of pickups of online-ordered goods. This will only be possible with the presentation of the quarterly figures of the major retail chains.
The market researchers interviewed by Forbes unanimously report a cautious but stable business. Customers no longer bought spontaneously but targeted, and no longer see Black Friday as a central event, but only as one of many opportunities for price comparison. Salesforce attributes this to the seven percent inflation in the USA.
(nie)
