Thanks to Geno Prussakov, I happened upon the IBM CoreMetrics study on Black Friday Sales Results for 2011.
If you’re an online small business owner, I think there’s a few things worth noting in it.
Mobile Online Shopping is Way Up
If you look at the Mobile Summary Metrics, you’ll see that not only was there a 209% increase in the percentage of e-commerce transactions compared to Black Friday 2010, but that there was a 32% increase in Conversion Rate. That’s a huge jump, and it may show that more consumers have confidence/trust in mobile security.
Social Media Failed to Grow on Black Friday
Across platforms (wireless, PC, etc), Social Media had less of an impact in actual conversions. While there was a modest increase in Social as a percentage of total web traffic (up 4.6%), it actually figured in a smaller percentage of actual sales by order number ( down almost 4%).
Takeaways
As a small business, I think we need to be paying more attention to Mobile. And generally, mobile is closely related to local. Ignore those two segments at your own peril.
For e-commerce sites and consumer goods brick and mortars, Social is still an important venue. It’s interesting that it played less of a role in actual hard dollars.
Did you find your results to be similar? Let us know below!
