Early Thanksgiving online sales figures rose 7% year-over-year to $15.6 billion, matching pre-pandemic trends

Thanksgiving weekend has long been seen as the normal start to a very powerful sales period for retailers, and up to now, all signs point to a powerful e-commerce holiday season ahead. Salesforce tracks activity in real time and has just released its first numbers for the day. It says that as of two p.m. ET, online sales were up 7% globally and 4% within the U.S. compared to 2023, generating $15.6 billion and $3.1 billion in sales, respectively.

By comparison, last 12 months’s Thanksgiving was slow for online shopping. Salesforce reported that online sales totaled $31.7 billion for the day, while U.S. sales totaled $7.5 billion. Each of them increased by only one%.

Salesforce says its 2024 numbers are based on purchasing data from 1.5 billion consumers, collected from customers and other data sources in its Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. You can see more Here.

We’ll update this post later with more data, including data from Adobe, which also tracks online sales. Last 12 months, Adobe Analytics he said that Americans spent $5.6 billion online on Thanksgiving Day, an estimated increase of just 5.5% from the previous 12 months.

The economy indeed stays volatile in lots of markets, so retailers are sweetening the deal to get customers to part with their money. Discounts average 24% worldwide and 27% within the US

Thanksgiving has grow to be a key day for mobile shopping within the US. With most brick-and-mortar stores closed and plenty of people hanging out with family and friends, they’re turning to their phones for a more subtle way to purchase discounted items.

Salesforce predicts that the strongest shopping period will probably be within the evening, after the feast, with 35% of all sales occurring between 7 p.m. and midnight. Thanksgiving can also be expected to be the largest day of the week overall for mobile shopping, with 73% of all sales today occurring on mobile devices.

The Internet has contributed to the numerous spread of holiday shopping. Black Friday was once a novel shopping phenomenon in America, falling just after Thanksgiving and kicking off the vacation shopping season.

Now, not only are you able to find “Black Friday” sales events around the globe (where Thanksgiving doesn’t exist except within the distribution of American television programming), but these and other holiday sales days have come to be wrapped up in “Cyber ​​Week”, which begins on just a few days before carving a turkey or roasting a pumpkin.

Salesforce recognized Tuesday of this week as the beginning of Cyber ​​Week and reported that sales increased 7% and 14% globally and within the US, respectively.

Sometimes it looks like we have reached a plateau in innovation when it comes to e-commerce, but generative AI could have something to say about it. Salesforce reported that retailers’ use of digital agents and GenAI is up 32% from every week ago.

Salesforce clearly sees a business opportunity in creating AI bells and whistles, so perhaps that is why they’re revealing these specific details. “32% increase” doesn’t tell us how much AI tools even have – let alone how useful they’re in sales conversions or whether or not they’ve led to frustrated people leaving sites. We’ll have to see if more concrete statistics emerge this 12 months.

“Christmas shopping dynamics are increasing throughout Cyber ​​Week, with online traffic and sales increasing. After a full 12 months of waiting for the season’s best deals, shoppers are finally ready for holiday shopping and are increasingly willing to visit their favorite web sites via mobile devices,” Caila Schwartz, director of consumer research at Salesforce, said in an announcement.