• by Ray Schultz , November 30, 2020

Black Friday online orders leaped by 26% over those in 2019, with 58% of sales made by first-time buyers, Bluecore reports in an analysis of 1 billion cart events, 58.8 million orders and $7.1 billion in sales. 

The most first-time shoppers were seen in the Home Goods category (65%), followed by Apparel (50%), Beauty (51%), Footwear (62%), Jewelry (64%) and Technology (61%). 

However, most sectors saw a decrease in first-time buyers compared to 2019. The Jewelry category saw an 11% falloff in first-timers but an 18% increase in second-time purchasers. 

The latter could denote a wave of “revenge spending” as luxury shoppers shift their outlays from travel to goods, Bluecore notes.  

Otherwise, the only areas that saw an increase in first-time buyers YoY were Technology (12%), Beauty and Home. 

Of the first-time pandemic buyers, 7% of the shoppers in the Home category became repeat buyers during the early holiday season, versus 6% apiece of the Apparel and Jewelry purchasers, 5% of the technology buyers and 4% each of the Beauty and Footwear  

The Beauty vertical achieved a 46% increase in orders, followed by Technology at 43%, Home products with 42% and Jewelry at 38%. In contrast, Apparel drew only a 7% hike. 

In addition, 28% of shoppers viewed Black Friday products at least one month prior to purchase.

By category, this included Beauty (40%), Technology (32%), Apparel (31%), Jewelry (30%), Footwear (25%) and Home (23%). 

Bluecore also studied 9.7 billion shopper events on brands’ ecommerce sites and data from 1.5 billion first-party cookies.