Black Friday online spending passes $1bn for the first time ever

The US holiday shopping season has been well and truly kick-started by Thanksgiving this year, as Americans spent $633m online during turkey day, a 32 per cent increase on 2011.
More impressively still, comScore adds that online spending crossed the big billion milestone to reach $1.04 billion for the first time ever on Black Friday, a 26 per cent rise on the previous year.
Meanwhile, there's been $13.7bn spent online between November 1st to 23rd already, a 16 per cent year-on-year rise, while 57.3m Americans flocked to their digital devices to splash their cash – an 18 per cent rise.
Amazon was crowned as the most visited retail site, followed by Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple making up the top five. It should be noted that auction sites like eBay were excluded from the data, though eBay has reported mobile transactions rising by more than double on Black Friday and Thanksgiving.
Gian Fulgoni, chairman, comScore, said: "Despite the frenzy of media coverage surrounding the importance of Black Friday in the brick-and-mortar world, we continue to see this shopping day become more and more prominent in the e-commerce channel – particularly among those who prefer to avoid crowds at the stores.
"Meanwhile, Thanksgiving Day – which has historically been a lighter online holiday shopping day – continues to gain steam and grew well ahead of the current pace as more consumers opted to kick off their holiday shopping immediately after the big meal to take advantage of aggressive retailer promotions.
"We can look forward with anticipation to Cyber Monday, which according to norms we’ve observed over the past three years should be the heaviest online shopping day of the season with sales approaching $1.5 billion or even higher."

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