Slice Intelligence, which gathers e-commerce data from receipts linked to its Slice package tracking app, tells TechCrunch that Amazon dominated online Black Friday sales, accounting for 35.7 percent in e-commerce spending on November 27. A distant second, Best Buy brought in 8.23 percent of total online revenue, followed by Macy’s at 3.38 percent, Walmart at 3.35 percent and Nordstrom at 3.11 percent.
It’s hard to say whether these impressive Amazon numbers are skewing high because Slice’s users are more active online shoppers, but Amazon did post a release, touting its own success. While the e-commerce giant is mum on actual sales numbers, it said that had a record year for Amazon-branded products.
Slice also estimated that online Black Friday sales rose 7 percent, and that the preceding days saw a 14 percent uptick, due to sales starting early. The data showed that home furnishings site Wayfair saw the greatest rise in Black Friday spending, up 315 percent year-over-year.
The sales continued over the weekend and through “Cyber Monday,” with eBay showcasing a 12 percent increase in mobile spending during Cyber Weekend.
“Mobile has put shoppers in the driver’s seat this year, and they expect great deals and gift ideas throughout the holiday season, rather than just on individual days,” Jay Hanson, VP of Merchandising at eBay tells TechCrunch.
The company said it sold 7,000 ExxonMobile gift cards (uh, Merry Xmas), 7,500 hoverboards and that its top-selling toy was a robot.
PayPal, which recently separated from eBay, saw so much online traffic, that it temporarily experienced an outage on Cyber Monday.
The payments company tells TechCrunch that it also saw an uptick on mobile spending, particularly an increase in fashion buys. Electronics, cosmetics and toys were also popular app purchases.
“PayPal data shows that the holiday shopping season now starts on Sept 30th, two months before Black Friday,” Anuj Nayar, Sr. Director Global Initiatives at PayPal, tells TechCrunch. “While Cyber Monday is still PayPal’s busiest day of the year for online shopping as a whole, more and more people are shopping from their mobile devices after their turkey dinner on Thanksgiving.”
While many of the holiday sales numbers are staggering, BlueSnap and PYMNTS released a study that said that retailers could be selling a whole lot more. Their findings suggest that companies are missing out on as much as 36 percent in online sales due to “checkout frictions,” such as the buying process taking too long.
“They’re leaving a ton of money—we’re talking millions of dollars in sales—on the table and they have no idea,” Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap, tells TechCrunch. “And what we’re seeing with all this Cyber Monday spending is that a lot of shopping is moving online, so retailers really need to have a handle on exactly how much they’re losing due to online checkout problems.”
And with the significant shift to online shopping, improving efficiency will matter more than ever in the years to come.