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Black Friday Draws Crowds Online and Off

November 25, 2006

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Black Friday is typically the day shoppers cram themselves into retail stores, but this year there was also a crush of Black Friday shoppers in cyberspace, judging by problems suffered by some major ecommerce sites.

IT teams, it seems, worked overtime along with store clerks.

The online crush started Thanksgiving Day when Amazon.com put Xbox 360 video game consoles on sale. The resulting heavy traffic caused brief interruptions in service on the site throughout the day.

About the time shoppers began lining up waiting for stores to open, online shoppers were hitting the shopping portals. Wal-Mart.com suffered an overload that caused the site to crash repeatedly for much of the day.

Other ecommerce sites also reported problems, ranging from pages that wouldn't load to painfully slow searches.

The IT teams may not get much rest anytime soon. While Black Friday is a huge day for "brick and mortar" retailers, it hasn't been that big for online retailers.

The Internet's big shopping day is Black Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving. That's when employees return to work after a four day break and use their office computer to shop.

It's estimated that nearly half of consumers (47.1%) plan to shop online during the holiday season, up from 36.0 percent three years ago.

Bricks and Mortar

Back in what George Allen might call the real world, consumers braved rain and cold weather in much of the nation, forming lines outside of stores hours before doors even opened.

Retailers kicked off Black Friday sales earlier than ever this year, with some welcoming eager shoppers as early as midnight.

"Retailers went all out this year with exciting promotions and big sales to bring in shoppers," said NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin. "Many stores offered substantial savings on big-ticket items for consumers and it seems that, for many shoppers, the deals were simply too good to pass up."

As expected, electronics and toys seem to be the big winners of the day, with retailers offering big bargains on high definition televisions, life-sized robots, mp3 players and game systems.

"Though retailers know the holiday season is far from over, they are encouraged by the amount of excitement and traffic that their Black Friday promotions have generated," said NRF President and CEO Tracy Mullin. "Although Black Friday is not the biggest day of the year for sales, it is a huge day for traffic, which gives retailers an opportunity to debut merchandise to consumers who will be shopping all holiday season long."

NRF estimates that holiday sales will rise 5.0 percent this year to $457.4 billion. NRF’s holiday sales forecast is based on an economic model using indicators like housing data, unemployment and previous monthly retail sales reports and includes retail industry sales from November and December.

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