Black Friday Sales Boosted Online

While many stores opened at midnight on Black Friday in order to offer shoppers the option to start their holiday purchasing early and beat the rush, it seems many shoppers decided to skip the crowds altogether and start their holiday shopping online.

Courtesy of Jay Lopez

While Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, has traditionally been the day set aside for great online deal, this year Black Friday online sales were up by 24.3% over last year, according to an IBM study of 500 retailers.

As part of this, sales on mobile devices increased to 9.8% this year, up 5.6% from 2010. And there was a large increase in shoppers using mobile devices to research in-store and online bargains, as mobile traffic surged to 14.3% from 5.6% the year before.

It should come as no surprise that the majority of this mobile shopping was done on Apple products, with the iPad and iPhone accounting for 10.2% of all online retail traffic on Black Friday. As other studies have shown, iPad shoppers were more likely to complete a purchase than those using other devices.