Posts Tagged ‘Thanksgiving’

 

2012 Holiday Season: Record Breaking Online Activity (Already)

Monday, November 26th, 2012

The term “Cyber Monday” made it’s debut in November of 2005, ushering in a new era of online marketing, promotions and early-bird specials. Six years later, it seems Cyber-Monday is trumping Black Friday, but not just in the area of online sales. A multitude of records have already been broken during the start of this year’s holiday season.

Staggering Stats

The National Retail Federation reported in a press release that “a record 247 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend, up from 226 million last year. Making sure to take advantage of retailers’ promotions to the full extent, the average holiday shopper spent $423 this weekend, up from $398 last year. Total spending reached an estimated $59.1 billion.”

Forbes listed the top five most-visited online retailers on Black Friday (with auctions sites excluded from the rankings) as follows:

1. Amazon

2. Walmart

3. Best Buy

4. Target

5. Apple

Forbes also offers a Cyber Monday cheat sheet for bargain hunters who will, no doubt, help shatter the previous online sales record of  $1.25 billion dollars (up 22% from Cyber Monday 2010). More on that here. 

Instagram’s Busiest Day

Photos of beautifully brined and browned turkeys exploded on Instagram this past Thursday.

From the Instagram blog: “Over 10 million photos that mentioned Thanksgiving-themed words in their captions were shared yesterday. For several hours throughout the day, more than 200 photos about Thanksgiving were posted every second.”

“Overall, the day broke all Instagram records as we saw the number of shared photos more than double from the day before, making it our busiest day so far.”

Cyber Monday Mania

As noted above, 2011 brought sales over over $1.25 billion with a 22% increase from the year prior.

With consumer confidence increasing as well as Zillow posting home values had their biggest monthly jump in value in seven years, we may see a the perfect storm for spending this year.