By all early reports, this year’s Black Friday was a huge day for the retail community. And it was an enormous day for online sales. comScore’s report said that Black Friday online sales totaled a whopping $816 million – a figure that sets it apart from any other shopping day this year.
Those sales dwarfed 2010’s Black Friday online sales – a jump of 26% year-over-year. Over 50 million Americans participated in online shopping last Friday.
And at the top of the list of retailers that benefited from the online shopping push is Amazon. The comScore report indicates that Amazon beat out Walmart and Best Buy to be the top online retailer on Friday. Amazon has just released some information on that day’s sales – and the Kindle reigned supreme.
According to the release, Black Friday 2011 was the best ever for the Kindle. Kindle sales apparently increased fourfold year-over-year.
“Even before the busy holiday shopping weekend, we’d already sold millions of the new Kindle family and Kindle Fire was the bestselling product across all of Amazon.com. Black Friday was the best ever for the Kindle family – customers purchased 4X as many Kindle devices as they did last Black Friday – and last year was a great year,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “In addition, we’re seeing a lot of customers buying multiple Kindles – one for themselves and others as gifts – we expect this trend to continue on Cyber Monday and through the holiday shopping season.”
They also said that the new Kindle Fire tablet remained the top selling item on the site, a title it has held since it was introduced back in September.
Amazon wasn’t the only online retailer selling tablets on Black Friday – Apple, as you probably know, had a big Black Friday sale this year. Naturally, a “big sale” for Apple is different than a “big sale” for other retailers. But Apple’s offerings included $100 off certain MacBooks and a few dozen dollars off the iPad 2 and iPod Touch.
But apparently, it was enough to get people shopping – both online and in stores. According to a source inside Apple, the company had it’s best retail sales day ever. From 9to5Mac –
Apple Retail was forecast and broke Retail sales records all over the country today, this is from [redacted] today, the forecast today is more than 4 times what we normally do. We broke the forecast by 7pm.
Reports suggest that Cyber Monday (the newer shopping holiday devoted to online shopping, taking place today), could see over 1 billion dollars in online purchasing. There’s no doubt that both Amazon and Apple will be huge parts in that total.
Are you participating in this giant shopping week? Let us know in the comments.