It's not good news for brick-and-mortar retailers. While Black Friday online sales hit a record high, retail sales at brick-and-mortar stores declined 6.2% compared with last year.
Understandably, an increasing number of people have started preferring shopping online as physical stores continue to suffer. However, the decline in retail sales at brick-and-mortar stores has more than sufficiently been overcome by online sales.
E-commerce helping retailers
Black Friday remains to be the biggest shopping day of the year in the United States and this time too it wasn't any different. However, according to preliminary data from ShopperTrack, brick-and-mortar retailers continued to witness a decline in sales, as more people preferred shopping online.
Black Friday online spending hit a record high of $7.4 billion making it the second-biggest single shopping day ever, behind last year's Cyber Monday when online shopping surpassed $7.9 billion according o Adobe Analytics.
That said, predictions are that this year's Cyber Monday will be even bigger than last year's, which will make it the biggest single-day shopping in the history of the United States.
Competition intensifies
Retails sales at brick-and-mortar stores have been suffering for the past few years with online players taking the game away. This gets proved from the year-long share pullback in retail stores that includes big names like Target Corporation, Macy's, Kohl's and Foot Locker.
Shares of all these companies are down more than 25% year to date. One the other hand Amazon, which takes the credit of changing the entire retail ballgame over the last few years, has gained more than 20% year to date.
However, sales at brick-and-mortar stores witnessed a jump of 2.3% on Thanksgiving Day this year, per ShopperTrak. Still that makes a combined decline of 3% over the two-day shopping period.
Moreover, the surge in online shopping is also an indication that consumers are becoming more comfortable purchasing even bigger products like televisions and refrigerators online at discounted prices.
Black Friday typically used to be a shopping festival when people would queue up in front of stores since morning to make the most of the best deals.
The surge is sales every year on Cyber Monday is one of the biggest proofs that more people want to shop online. This year's Cyber Monday is expected to generate record sales of $9.4 billion.
