The Retail Insider: Black Friday Mobile Trends and More!
Michael Spencer
A.I. Writer, researcher and curator - full-time Newsletter publication manager.
In thinking about how the store of the future is human centric, this is an interesting time to watch Retail.
As mobile shopping increases, the mad Blackfriday stampedes of eras past are becoming a distant memory for most Americans.
Online sales reached $490 million on Black Friday morning, with mobile generating 57% of visits and a hearty 40% chunk of sales, according to Adobe Digital Insights
Let's take a closer look at some of the trends.
Post-Thanksgiving mood
Retailers across the country hired between 640,000 and 690,000 temporary workers for the holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. We can learn a lot from our temp workers, it turns out.
As mobile continues to transform how we do discount sales, foot traffic is expected to continue its sharp decline. This trend is exasperated by longer and earliear sales by the likes of Walmart, BestBuy and of course Amazon.
In 2015, foot traffic fell by 2 percent -- and that will likely be the case for 2016 too.
According to research by FourSquare, winners of Black Friday include:
- Big box Retailers
- Discount stores such as Dollar Stores
Another winning category: Discount stores, such as dollar stores, are gaining in foot traffic compared to last year. Historically, discount stores haven't seen a huge Black Friday boost, but they do gain momentum later on in the season.
So while overall foot-traffic will be down 2.0-3.5%, the real story remains mobile's increase and the evolution of Amazon Prime.
Bargain-hungry shopping is an American past-time, and we as consumers are getting better at it. Doorbusting sales aren't offering the customer experience, of sophisticated e-commerce algorithms.
The Black Friday shopping extravaganze is barking up a new door especially for Millennials, who are growing up in Amazon's ecosystem.
Looking at this year, we see that September through October foot traffic in department stores was down by 7%, that's hugely significant for what the future of brick-and-mortar has to offer.
According to Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare, these stores will show an increase in foot traffic:
- Marshalls
- Dillard's
- Macy's
- Lord & Tyalor
- Saks Fifth Avenue
- Neiman Marcus
According to sophisticated Foursquare data, all six of these brands have seen stronger foot traffic patterns than their competitors in the past two months and should anticipate strong year-over-year performance.
According to Retail Dive, e-commerce (and mobile) is having significant continued growth here on Discount weekend events.
Thanksgiving Day online sales totaled $1.93 billion, showing growth of 11.5%, Adobe reported. Mobile sales alone reached $449 million between midnight and 5 p.m. Thanksgiving Day, a 58% year-over-year leap.
- 4.7% online sales growth for November, at $29.09 billion by Black Friday morning.
- Mobile sales show a 58% year-over-year leap, on just Thanksgiving day.
- 57% of visits now come from mobile devices. The interesting thing about this number is that it's similar to what we are seeing with Amazon's overall numbers as well.
Amazonification is making us not just more mobile-centric shoppers, but IoT shoppers from the home with Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Dash continuing to evolve.
With Walmart now fully on board with ecommerce and mobile, they are seeing an astounding 70% of traffic driven by mobile devices to Walmart.com during its Black Friday event this year.
Walmart bet on Electronics
It's significant that this year Walmart has bet big on deals in electronics, with over 50% of Black Friday promotions spotlighting consumer electronics products, far more than Target or Amazon this year. Walmart has also tripled its product offering from 8 million to more than 23 million items in its ecommerce push, it's hard to imagine that this won't produce good results.
Of course Amazon is evolving and ahead in the game:
All this is pointing to a decline in brick-and-mortar lineups and Black Friday door slamming as consumers just aren't as into it, with a better mobile experience and ecommerce habituation. Amazon, BestBuy, Walmart, Target and so many others are getting better at holding discount sales events online, fewer big-box retailers are opening on Thanksgiving itself and Cyber Monday is becoming Cyber weekend.
Are we Seeing a Post-Mobile Commerce Trend?
Pretty soon, we'll be doing our shopping with personal assistants in smart speakers, even taking share away from mobile.
For Amazon, at the rate Echo and Dash are evolving, they are entering a post-mobile era of digital influence, and as Amazon Prime optimization channels they are light years ahead of their competitors. The likes of Walmart are still trying to get e-commerce right and 2016 might be the first year they have got a winning formula.
Share this post and share your insights:
How do you see ecommerce and mobile evolving this Holiday season for retail and commerce? How do you see smart speakers like Echo and Google Home influencing shopping in 2017?
Confidential
8 年Any normal human being endowed with common sense, critical thinking and scientific reasoning, is immune from Jedi mind tricks ... employed by the government, media, advertisers and marketeers. The usual daily dose of mind control is delivered via the magic black square or rectangle programming box, permanently positioned, in almost every room, in almost every home, throughout the world. Your perceptions have been cleverly manipulated by marketeers employing a subtle human conditioning mind control technique known as Predictive Programming. You have been programmed to really believe that corporate media hyped Black Friday (sic) sale offers are irresistibly low-priced bargains, never to be had again, whereas there is no factual evidence or data to support this totally predictive assumption. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a method for controlling people's minds that was invented by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s, became popular in the psychoanalytic, occult and New Age worlds in the 1980s, and TV news media, advertising, marketing and politics in the 1990s and 2000s.