• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 1, 2019

This holiday shopping season might be six days shorter compared with last year, but it has not slowed down consumers searching for deals and spending more per visit.

As consumers go back to work on Cyber Monday, Adobe forecast that the day will not only break records for small merchants, but will set a new record compared with the prior year, by climbing 18.9% to reach $9.4 billion in sales.

Paid and organic search traffic accounted for 42.4% of all ecommerce visits on Black Friday, with smartphones accounting for 60%, according to Adobe Analytics data.

Black Friday reached a record $7.4 billion in online sales, the second-largest online sales day ever. Last year on Cyber Monday, consumers spent $7.9 billion.

About 61% of all online traffic to retailers came from smartphones, 15.8% higher than last year. Still, desktops drove $40.3 billion in November.

Black Friday was also the biggest day ever for mobile shopping with $2.9 billion in sales coming from smartphones. Some 39% of all ecommerce sales were made on a smartphone, up 21% increase YoY.

Despite early and deep discounts, Black Friday remained a day when shoppers came online looking for and finding better offers than they could find in physical stores. 

Consumers also became more comfortable buying bigger-ticket items online. The Average Order Value (AOV) on Black Friday rose 5.9% to %168 for Black Friday, setting a new record.

Voice did not have much of an impact. Very few merchants offer support for purchasing through voice artificial intelligence technology, and not many consumers leveraged the technology to make a purchase.

Email is one of the top ways that consumers prefer to receive information about deals, compared with text messages and other forms of media. It has made email a leading source for online sales and traffic.

Online video advertising rose about 30% in viewable completion rates, as consumers are for more receptive to advertising during the holiday season than they are during other times in the year.