More people shopped online than shopped in stores over the 2015 Thanksgiving weekend, according to a survey by Prosper Insights & Analytics for the National Retail Federation. Over 103 million people say they shopped online vs. under 102 million that say they shopped in stores over the Thanksgiving weekend, the NRF said.
Friday was the biggest shopping day of the weekend in stores by numbers of shoppers, according to the survey, with a significant number shopping on the holiday:
- Thursday 34.6 million in-store shoppers
- Friday 74.2 million in-store shoppers
- Saturday 46.8 million in-store shoppers
Thanksgiving Day was a bigger day online:
- Thursday 41 million online shoppers
- Friday 75.3 million online shoppers
Survey respondents were shopping for items offered by geek culture stores. According to the survey, 32.8% of weekend shoppers bought toys; 31.9% bought books, DVDs, and videos/video games.
Online, the trend was toward mobile, with mobile traffic accounting for 57.2% of all online shopping traffic, according to a report by IBM Watson. The mobile share of purchases was not as strong as the share of traffic, however, accounting for 36.2% of purchases.
So how do these trends affect geek culture stores? We’re guessing that the move to online is driven in part by a desire to skip the crowds in the largest stores, and hoping that sales in geek culture stores, with strong communities, are more resilient.
There’s also growing visibility for Small Business Saturday (see “14 Billion Spent on Small Business Saturday”), and ComicsPro rolled out its first Local Comic Shop Day in 2015 (see “ComicsPro’s Local Comic Shop Day Exclusives Revealed”), both national programs designed to drive traffic to independent retailers.
