Mobile shopping hits record numbers over Thanksgiving and Black Friday

Black Friday has only just begun, but already mobile traffic and sales are breaking records compared with years prior, according to third-party reports and those from major retailers, out this morning. In addition to yesterday’s Thanksgiving sales report of a record $771 million in revenue from mobile devices, top retailers, including Amazon, Walmart and Target, have also now released numbers pointing to mobile’s sizable impact on their online sales.

According to Amazon, Thanksgiving has now become one of the busiest mobile shopping days on the retailer’s site in the U.S. The company reported that mobile orders on Thanksgiving have exceeded both last year’s Thanksgiving as well as Cyber Monday 2015.

Although many U.S. consumers have only just started shopping Black Friday deals on Amazon’s site, the company says it’s on track to beat last year’s sales holiday in terms of items ordered, with Alexa devices, like the Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick and Alexa Voice Remote among the best sellers so far.

Meanwhile, rival Walmart this morning reported that Thanksgiving was again one of its top shopping days of the year. It kicked off its Black Friday sales last night at 6 PM. Since then, Walmart has already seen that more than 70 percent of traffic to its website has been driven by mobile, it says.

It’s also worth noting that, this year, Walmart took a page from Amazon’s playbook and announced earlier this month that it would for the first time offer exclusive deals for mobile app users. On November 10th, those who had downloaded the Walmart mobile application could shop select Black Friday deals early, including those on electronics, like a discounted TV, Xbox One and tablet, among other things. It hasn’t yet detailed the impact this has had on sales from its app, however.

cartwheel-hand

Target, too, is chiming in on Friday with figures that speak to its own successes on mobile so far. The retailer had a record-breaking Thanksgiving, with both traffic and sales topping Cyber Monday in 2015. Related to this, mobile traffic was also up this year, and mobile sales accounted for over 60 percent of the retailer’s total online sales on Thursday.

Like Amazon and Walmart, Target also enticed people to its app this year by offering customers pre-sale deals via its Cartwheel savings application, which resulted in the biggest shopping day ever for new users of the app.

Target is continuing to push Cartwheel, which now has 30 million users, by offering app users an additional 15 percent off when shopping with its mobile companion while in-store on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Ebay also reported a surge in mobile shopping, noting that the share of gross merchandise bought on mobile grew to 38 percent versus the desktop this Thanksgiving, up from 35 percent last year.

Update: Adobe’s figures (top) updated at 11 AM ET when final numbers were released; Updated at 11:15 AM ET with eBay mobile data.