Target posts big gains as Black Friday crowds converge online

The busiest shopping week of the year was bigger than ever, thanks to new consumers shopping online. According to new data from Slice Intelligence, Cyber Week - the Tuesday before Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday - brought 14 percent more shoppers online than there were last year; contributing to 18 percent growth in overall revenue.  So not only were more dollars being spent online, there were more people spending those dollars than ever before.

Almost across the board, the larger online retailers posted significant growth for the entirety of Cyber Week as Best Buy, Amazon, Apple, and Walmart grew between 19 and 25 percent. Among the top five Cyber Week retailers, the big winner was Target who grew by an astonishing 44 percent over Cyber Week 2016. In terms of volume, no one can touch Amazon, whose sales were nearly 4x those of its closest Cyber Week competitor, Best Buy.

Cyber Monday has traditionally been the day to shop online but this year, the overall number of online buyers grew more on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday. The number of buyers on Black Friday was up 15 percent compared to 11 percent on Cyber Monday, and the average spend of Black Friday buyers was $157.87-- 13 percent higher than Cyber Monday buyers, who spent an average of $140.04. Sales on the big day--the biggest Black Friday ever-- were up 18 percent from 2016, while Cyber Monday rang up 11 percent more online sales.

With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.