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PayPal says mobile shopping accounted for a third of Thanksgiving & Black Friday sales

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New data from PayPal further confirms mobile’s contribution to e-commerce retailers’ bottom lines over Thanksgiving and Black Friday. According to data from its network, mobile devices accounted for a third of all total payment volume on both of these top shopping days this year – figures that back up earlier reports that mobile accounted for roughly a third of online spending on Black Friday.

Adobe recently reported that Black Friday online spending had hit a record-breaking $3 billion this year, with over a billion coming from mobile devices.

PayPal’s figures offer a second confirmation of this larger trend. Its number are notable because its network today reaches 192 million active customers and 15 million active merchants. On both Thanksgiving Day and on Black Friday, PayPal found that approximately one-third of all payment volume on its network was taking place on mobile devices, the company says.

Black Friday still topped Thanksgiving on a couple of key metrics, PayPal also noted. The total payment volume per second on Friday was $15,507.00, compared with $10,781.00 for Thanksgiving. In addition, Black Friday shoppers spent more, as the average amount spent was $62.35 on that day, compared with $58.51 on Thanksgiving Day.

PayPal found that shoppers were spending the most on fashion purchases on both days, but that seems to be more an indication of the types of merchants in its network, rather than something that’s representative of a larger online shopping trend. After all, what’s selling will vary by retailer. For example, Amazon said that its Echo Dot the best-selling item on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and its customers had also ordered over 3 million toys.

However, what both Adobe and PayPal’s reports point to is how Black Friday online shopping now stretches across multiple days, instead of only taking place on Friday, and then getting boosted again by the retailer-dubbed event known as “Cyber Monday.”

Instead, consumers have expanded their online shopping to cover the four days between Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday, according to another report out this morning from IBM. Over this four-day period, global sales were up nearly 20 percent over the same time last year, while U.S. sales were up by over 9 percent, IBM said.

In addition, IBM is predicting that Cyber Monday will increase by double digits over last year, and that overall November and December 2016 sales will increase by nearly 14 percent over 2015.

Its report comes from data pulled by over 17,000 companies worldwide, including 7 of the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500, which is sizable enough to indicate larger online shopping trends.

Black Friday and Thanksgiving sales saw larger growth than what’s being estimated for Cyber Monday, IBM also noted. Online sales for global retailers increased by nearly 24 percent year-over-year on Thanksgiving, and were up over 28 percent on Black Friday.

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