Shoppers skipped the lines at in-person stores in favor of virtual carts and one-click checkouts this year, as consumers spent more online during Black Friday than ever before.
Adobe Analytics tracked the purchasing habits of U.S. shoppers and found that they spent $10.8 billion on online purchases on Black Friday. That’s 10% more than in 2023 and more than double the spend in 2017. Even more notably, online purchases exceeded $10 billion for the first time.
“Crossing the $10 billion mark is a big e-commerce milestone for Black Friday, for a day that in the past was more anchored towards in-store shopping,” said Adobe Digital Insight lead analyst Vivek Pandya in a statement.
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At their highest point between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., online shoppers spent $11.3 million a minute. Adobe says toys, jewelry, appliances, apparel, and electronics were key categories for driving sales. Hot items included Lego sets, fitness trackers, and skincare.
E-commerce site Shopify, which enables small businesses to sell products by helping them set up and launch online stores, saw Black Friday sales among its clients reach a record $5 billion this year. The platform’s founder and CEO Tobi Lutke posted on X on Saturday that sales among merchants hit $4.6 million per minute at their peak.
Yesterday was an incredible day for our merchants and for Shopify:
* Merchants drove a record-breaking $5 billion Black Friday in sales (GMV)
* Peak sales / minute for yesterday = $4.6 million
* Shopify’s egress processed more than 173B requests
* Peak requests per minute was…
— tobi lutke (@tobi) November 30, 2024
Shopify told Entrepreneur in an email that the top product categories sold by merchants through its platform were t-shirts, skincare, vitamins, makeup, and hoodies. The top-selling cities were Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. The average cart price was $154.26.
Though Black Friday was a major online shopping event, Adobe expects Cyber Monday to be even bigger and for shoppers to spend a record $13.2 billion that day — an over 6% increase from 2023. Cyber Monday is set to become the biggest shopping e-commerce event of the year.
Zooming out more, U.S. shoppers are expected to spend up to $989 billion this holiday season according to the National Retail Federation, including online and in-person purchases.
