• by Jamie Tedford , Op-Ed Contributor, December 2, 2014

There was a lot of debate about stats over the holiday shopping weekend. Were in-store sales up on Black Friday? Did Cyber Monday sales cannibalize retail sales? Did deals launching earlier in November or stores opening on Thanksgiving Day have a positive or negative net effect?

I have one question in response: Who cares? Overall, holiday sales will be up this year. The rest of the analysis you’ll read this week is at best prognostication and at worst fear-mongering. Eventually, the final tallies for Q4 will tell the whole story.

Here’s a question that’s actually interesting: What does all this confusion teach us about how the best holiday retailers are now strategizing for holiday sales?

It used to be that Black Friday was a brick-and-mortar holiday, and Cyber Monday was for  online-only retailers. Not anymore. According to IBM, Black Friday online sales grew by almost 10% this year.  According to the National Retail Federation, 126 million people shopped online on Cyber Monday, down from 131 million last year.  The reason?  According to the president of that organization “For today’s shoppers, everyday is Cyber Monday.”  

This year, it’s all about the omnichannel experience, baby! Driven by the rise of mobile shopping, omnichannel strategies cohesively combine online and offline marketing and retail efforts.

In past years, two battles were fought: one at the mall and one online. The phenomenon that changed everything was called “showrooming,” where shoppers investigate products in-store, then purchase them from online competitors. Suddenly, the competition was being waged at the point of the smartphone-toting consumer. Many brick-and-mortar retailers reacted, and this started the omnichannel arms race.

Most of them now offer free in-store pickup, including Walmart, Target, Sears, Nordstrom -- and pretty much every other major retailer I Googled. (Kohl’s is still piloting its program.)

Today, we are seeing much more advanced omnichannel strategies out there. Take Best Buy, for example. The electronics retailer was the poster child for showrooming pain a few years ago.

Last year, Best Buy embraced the phenomenon and turned it on its head. This began with a permanent price-matching guarantee. Perhaps the most innovative thing Best Buy did last season was dramatically shorten delivery times for online purchases by shipping from its local stores—a strategy that helped Best Buy deliver faster than Amazon. This Black Friday, Best Buy’s website got so much mobile traffic that it actually crashed.

At the cutting edge of omnichannel commerce this year, you’ll find features like Target’s new real-time inventory map, which lets shoppers locate stores that have the items they want in stock. The map then helps shoppers who’ve arrived in-store actually locate those items.

People aren’t just searching for products from their phones, either. Social activity is huge on and around major holidays. Facebook is a top time-killer for shoppers waiting in line. So major retailers have begun to deliver Facebook ads to people who are near their store locations. This hyperlocal targeting means effectively reaching the crowds most likely to stroll in unplanned.

Mobile is at the heart of great omnichannel marketing. Smartphones drove 34.7% of Black Friday online traffic, in addition to the 14.6% contributed by tablets – meaning for the first time, nearly 50% of online Black Friday shopping happened on mobile devices. This is a 25% increase over last year.

In the end, the question is not online or off, it’s omnichannel or not. With omnichannel strategies evolving so rapidly, I think we’ll see big retail brands that embrace the blurred lines ultimately dominating the 2014 holiday shopping season across the board. We’ll find out for sure at the next earnings reports.

Either way, can’t we all agree that one shopping holiday is enough? The four-day omnichannel shopping period just following Thanksgiving is begging for a catchy new name — any ideas?