ONLINE SHOPPING IS HUGE NOW
On Black Friday last year, 308 million people braved the crowds and the chaos at brick and mortar retail stores. $59.1 billion was spent throughout that weekend and $11.4 billion ended up being spent just on Black Friday 2012. This number is projected to increase by 3.1% in 2013. That’s a lot of commerce going on. Oh, and only 47% of the shoppers said they actually enjoyed it. So how will anything make shopping like that ever disappear?
The United States isn't the only country celebrating shopping holidays. Just take a look at China, and their own “Singles Day” (11/11) when young bachelors (China has the highest ratio of single men to single women) are encouraged to pamper themselves by buying things they've wanted all year. Online sales during Singles Day (as in only online sales) peaked at an astonishing $5.7 Billion, more than double that of Cyber Monday. If Singles Day were a country, it would be ranked 150th in Nominal Country GDP.
THE CLOUD MAKES IT ALL POSSIBLE
This type of commerce is now more accessible for companies because of the evolution of technology. Cloud technology in particular enables online retailers to handle the stress and influx of so many transactions taking place all at once. Just take a look at Alibaba (China’s number one online retailer) which breezed through 340,000 completed transactions within the first minute, all made possible by its touted cloud based ZTE network.
Look at Alibaba's counterparts in the United States. The top 3 online retailers: Amazon, Walmart.com and BestBuy.com all saw their traffic increase 36%, 21%, and 10% respectively. Amazon’s infrastructure has expanded to include priority shipping to most locations within 2 days. This also includes their expanded cloud infrastructure as well. Cloud computing is facilitating these drastic increases in traffic, without forcing a spend on more servers. Therefore, major commerce sites are able to take advantage of “pay what you use” instead of investing in additional hardware.
THE END OF BLACK FRIDAY?
With the increase in penetration of technology, predictions spell an end to Black Friday. How do people discover these deals? Most shoppers, 62%, say they have a plan as to which stores they will go to based upon the deals they have discovered….online. On top of this, Cyber Monday sales increased by 36% in 2012 according to IBM. That’s compared to a measly 1.7% growth in traditional Black Friday commerce.
More telling still is the penetration of mobile commerce on Cyber Monday (this includes tablets). Out of this growth, 18% is attributed to mobile devices, which is a staggering 70% increase over 2011. In addition to all of this, sentiment analysis of online shoppers was gleaming regarding how easy it was to do what they needed.
So just take a look at the numbers. The writing is on the wall. With the advent of the cloud accommodating the influx of websites, in combination with the penetration of mobile devices used for shopping, Black Friday may just disappear. What happens when online retailers switch their sales to Friday to compete with retail? Maybe then, we might be able to sit down and actually eat a Thanksgiving meal (though it may be while on the couch, watching football, with our tablet in our hand).
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