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by Xinhua writer Yang Shilong, Li Ming
NEW YORK, Nov. 25 (Xinhua) -- To Kenny Sun's surprise, it took him only about one hour or so to buy and return an iPad 4 at a local flagship store of Best Buy, a major U.S. consumer-electronics retailer, in the morning of 2016's Black Friday, a day used to be frenzy and chaotic for the brick-and-mortar businesses.
"It seems there are less bargain-seeking shoppers in the store this year and it's not that chaotic at all in the store as it was before," said Sun, who came to America with his parents from Malaysia around 20 years ago.
The soft-spoken, tech savvy young man returned the article because he found one better deal at a store of Target Corp., at the upper level of the Queens Place Mall, an urban shopping center in New York.
Sun was not alone in making the observation.
"This holiday season, it's a near certainty that online shopping - not brick-and-mortar mall visits - will be the key driver of sales growth for the retail industry," tweeted Sarah Halzack, a national retail reporter for Washington Post.
Shoppers spent 1.15 billion U.S. dollars online from midnight to 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, according to data from Adobe, a retail data analyst.
The reasons people are opting for online shopping are changing, according to a recent survey by Adobe on consumer's shopping behavior.
In 2015, 66 percent of respondents said they shopped online because they believed they had got lower prices and good deals. This year, just 55 percent of shoppers gave that answer.
Last year, some 56 percent of people said free shipping was a reason to shop online; this time around, that slipped to 50 percent.
Meanwhile, convenience-related factors proved increasingly potent in getting people to buy online. Some 24 percent of shoppers said they chose online so they did not have to deal with traffic or lines, up from 20 percent last year.
"I work from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., I do not have a chance to shop in the day though I am here," said Suki, a saleswoman at the Queens Place Mall. "It's good that the Black Friday deals are put online, well before the day comes."
Like Suki, many shoppers turned to digital shopping because of the product availability, product variety or the ability to make purchases at work.
Interestingly, mobile traffic to shopping sites will overtake desktop traffic, Adobe said, predicting the smallest screens will finally be king, accounting for 53 percent of all visits to retail websites during the holiday season starting from the Thanksgiving.
Target reported more than 60 percent of its online sales came from mobile customers, while Amazon reported mobile orders on Turkey Day exceeded Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday last year.
Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, but it has expanded in recent years, retailing experts say. It has been a trend that people are increasingly spreading out their shopping throughout the whole holiday season instead of concentrating it on this single day.
The U.S. National Retail Federation surveyed consumers heading into the holiday season about their shopping plans and found that nearly 102 million people plan to shop online or in stores on Friday. Nearly 29 million of them planned to do so on Thanksgiving Day.
Major retailers have taken immediate actions. Target put its Black Friday deals online Wednesday and said it sold 3,200 televisions a minute during the first hour that doors were open. The retailer was offering a 50-inch Hisense 4K TV for 249.99 U.S. dollars.
"We delivered our third consecutive quarter of 24 percent domestic online sales growth." Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly said in a call with analysts on Nov. 17. "This growth was driven by increased traffic and the cumulative benefit of our investments over the past few years in the digital customer experience and enhanced dot-com capabilities."
