For Cyber Monday, retailers seemed to have a different strategy for product discounting than what I observed in-store on Black Friday. While great deals on video products mainly took center stage Friday, Monday had a decidedly PC and imaging feel. I noted several offers for laptops, digital cameras, PNDs and accessories that, while present Friday, weren’t as prominent in-store. NPD’s Anatomy of Black Friday Study found that for Cyber Monday PCs and cameras were the most commonly purchased CE products, bought by 28 percent and 20 percent of all tech purchasers, respectively.
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As the early returns come in on the holiday shopping weekend results from various sources, including NPD’s Anatomy of Black Friday consumer survey, a few things are becoming clear. While brick-and-mortar stores likely had a tough time on Black Friday, as we estimate electronics sales up only minimally overall, online sales truly came into their own this year. For those of us in the consumer technology business that is no surprise, sales have been growing rapidly online for a few years. But a funny thing happened on the way to this sales growth. What clearly propelled this year’s growth was the online marketplace’s embrace of traditional retail marketing tactics.
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NPD’s newly released weekly ecommerce data for the first few weeks of the holiday shows, as it has in our monthly tracking all year, a considerable divergence in trends between brick and mortar retailing and online sales. In the weekly data we saw strong results, as expected, for ecommerce during the Cyber Monday week, but in addition we saw very strong growth -stronger than in Cyber Monday week - for ecommerce during Black Friday week. Sales growth in general was much stronger online than in stores for both weeks.
So, is ecommerce the light at the end of the tunnel for consumer technology retailing or is it a freight train, ready to crush physical retailing like Wile E Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons? It is fascinating that in the 10 years or so since Internet retailing burst into our consciousness that we are still asking this question.
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Consumer Technology | Ben Arnold, Director of Industry Analysis | 
November 30, 2011 11:23 am | 
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