Holiday shopping will never be the same. This past Thanksgiving and Black Friday weekend, in-store sales were down 1.5%. However, as terrible as that initially sounds, it may be due to the fact that holiday shopping deals are going on for longer both before and after the Black Friday holiday online. More retailers are dubbing it Cyber-Week making it more convenient for shoppers to get deals on their own terms and making that 1.5% seem a lot less meaningful.
The real story of the season is mobile shopping (up 14.8% over 2014 and accounting for 60% of all online sales), which has come to the holiday shopping season’s rescue in a big way. According to the National Retail Federation, 103 million people shopped online with 102 million doing their shopping in brick and mortar stores, pushing total Web-based sales up 21% over the last year.