Traffic to websites on Black Friday rose slightly, but sales surged, giving retailers an early Christmas present.
Traffic to the Nielsen/NetRatings Holiday eShopping Index, a service that tracks more than 120 online retailers, rose 12 percent on the Friday after Thanksgiving over the same day last year, Reuters reports. The big winner was eBay, with over 7.5 million unique visitors on Black Friday, followed by Amazon with 3.4 million unique visitors and Walmart.com with 3.2 million.
Electronics was the most popular product category, with traffic to electronics sites showing a 211 percent increase over the previous week, MediaPost writes, citing the AdRelevance figures.
Apparel and home and garden were also popular categories, showing 117 and 87 percent growth, respectively.
But the modest increase in traffic gave way to a sharp increase in sales, according to comScore, which estimates that consumers spent an estimated $434 million on Friday, an increase of 42 percent from the same day last year. For the period Nov. 1 through Black Friday, online retail spending overall climbed to $8.31 billion, up 23 percent from last year, according to comScore.
