— This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on November 26, 2018, Monday.
Let's take a look at the results of the shopping season, the black Friday on this past weekend in the United States. Generally speaking, the sales are very good, but such good results are mainly driven by online sales. This year's black Friday continues the trend of recent years that is e-commerce sales have been hitting record highs, while physical stores are facing a decline in customer flow. First, let's take a look at e-commerce
Online sales hit a record $6.22 billion on black Friday, up 23.6% from a year earlier, according to Adobe Analytics. Online sales the day before black Friday were $3.7 billion, up 28 percent from the day before last year, and this growth rate also notch e-commerce history record.
So the growth trend in e-commerce looks promising. E-commerce giant amazon, for example, announced that black Friday surpassed last year's sales in just nine hours. According to the analysis from the institution, the development trend of e-commerce in recent years makes more and more merchants set big discounts online earlier and earlier, this year, for the first time ever, online prices were as low the day before black Friday as they were the night before
That attracted a large number of consumers who had planned to go out to the department store shopping. Offline in-store sales have yet to be officially released this year, but there are already signs of a drop in in-store traffic. Data Company RETAILNEXT predicts that store traffic will fall between 5% and 9% from the day before black Friday to Friday night this year, while sales will drop between 4% and 7%. In comparison to previous years, in-store sales fell 8.9 percent in the last two days, while in-store sales declined 4.2 percent in the middle of 2016.
Both trends, rising and falling, have continued to change holiday shopping spending habits in the United States. Black Friday used to be a time when people braved the cold wind to stand in line through the night, and the crowds outside stores in the middle of the night represented the rise and fall of American retail. Now, to be sure, black Friday is not as crowded as it used to be.And this series of holiday consumption culture changes is all thanks to the growing popularity of online shopping.