Early holiday sales showing growth of mobile commerce

Black Friday may kick off the U.S. holiday buying season, but shoppers have already spent $2.4 billion online according to Adobe Analytics data cited by Business Insider by Statista. By 5 pm on Thanksgiving Day, the amount spent online went up by a further $1.75 billion. Even though U.S. shoppers are spending huge sums of money online, physical retail is still alive and well.

In the National Retail Federation’s recently-published 2018 Holiday Shopping Survey, consumers are expected to spend $1,007.24 over the holiday season, of which 55 percent of people said they’d shop online. About the same would go to a department store; 51 percent are planning on hitting a discount store while 44 percent are going to make holiday purchases in a supermarket.

According to a report at SensorTower, the top-10 shopping apps on the U.S. App Store added half a million first-time users Black Friday, up 16.3 percent from the same day in 2017. Overall new shopping app installs on the platform grew 9 percent year-over-year to approximately 1.8 million. Amazon topped the ranking of most-installed shopping apps, as it did last year, but runner-up Walmart posted more significant year-over-year-growth, the report said. The charts below rank the top 10 overall, brick-and-mortar, and online-only shopping apps for Black Friday 2018.