CE Foot Traffic Dropped 6.5 Percent Black Friday Weekend, ShopperTrak Says

Thanksgiving Day accounted for 12 percent of in-store sales over the four-day Black Friday weekend, up from 3.6 percent in 2012, according to retail tracking service ShopperTrak. Thanksgiving Day in-store receipts totaled $2.6 billion, compared with Black Friday volume of $9.8 billion. Sales tailed off in stores to $6.2 billion Saturday and $3.7 billion Sunday, according to data. Compared to last year, store traffic for wireless and electronics products fell 6.5 percent for the four days, while apparel traffic grew 9.4 percent, ShopperTrak said. Overall, store traffic slipped 4 percent -- an estimated 1.8 billion store visits -- from the comparable 2012 weekend, ShopperTrak said. Thanksgiving Day accounted for 10 percent of the four-day weekend’s retail traffic, it said.

Black Friday in-store shoppers “paced themselves” during November, leading to a drop-off in retail store traffic from Thanksgiving Day through the following Sunday as consumers began their holiday shopping and spending earlier in the month, said ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin. Black Friday weekend, “no longer a one-day event,” had a 1 percent increase in sales to $22.2 billion, Martin said. Shoppers made targeted purchases this year, researching products online first and then going to stores “ready to buy particular products,” Martin said.

In e-commerce, comScore reported holiday season spending of $20.6 billion for the first 29 days of the November-December season, up 3 percent from the corresponding days last year. Black Friday had $1.2 billion in desktop online sales, the season’s first billion-dollar online sales day and heaviest online spending day to date, up 15 percent over Black Friday last year. Thanksgiving Day, which has traditionally been a lighter day for online holiday spending, had a 21 percent jump in online sales over 2012 to $766 million, comScore said.

Goldman Sachs said in a Black Friday wrapup that ShopperTrak’s estimate of 2.3 percent year-to-year growth in in-store sales for Thursday and Friday aligned with Goldman’s forecast for the holiday period. The comScore estimate of a 17.3 percent e-commerce sales increase for Thursday and Friday “could underestimate the impact of mobile,” Goldman said. IBM estimated Black Friday mobile sales jumped 43 percent, to 22 percent of overall online sales. Extended store hours “likely proved dilutive to profitability,” as retailers added labor for the extra holiday shopping hours, in some cases at higher holiday pay scale, “for little incremental revenue,” Goldman said. More and “savvier” shoppers are moving online where they can search for deals more efficiently, it said, and that’s diluting the mix of consumers going to stores.

In its retailer scorecard, Goldman Sachs said Walmart drove the market in store hours and promotions and predicted positive same-store sales, an “improvement from recent trends.” Best Buy captured a broader category mix and a “richer mix of business,” reflecting the company’s “ongoing in-store initiatives,” Goldman said.

According to an NPD Black Friday study, consumers who bought tech products on Thanksgiving night were roughly three times more likely than average consumers to shop using a mobile device. With many promotions being driven by specific products such as tablets or big-screen TVs with “often very minor differences in the discounts,” mobile alerts “can be critical in driving shoppers to one store for an item over another,” said NPD analyst Ben Arnold.