Early Thanksgiving online sales numbers rose 7% YoY to $15.6B, in line with pre-pandemic trends

The Thanksgiving weekend has long been seen as the traditional start of the most important sales period for retailers, and so far, the indication is that we’re in for a strong holiday season for e-commerce. Salesforce tracks activity in real-time and just released its first stats for the day. It says as of 2pm ET, online sales are up 7% globally and 4% in the US compared to 2023, respectively generating $15.6 billion and $1 billion. 3.1.

As a point of comparison, last year saw a slow Thanksgiving when it came to online shopping. Salesforce said the full day generated $31.7 billion in online sales with the US seeing $7.5 billion in sales. Each rose by only 1%.

Salesforce said its 2024 figures are based on purchase data from 1.5 billion consumers captured across its customer base and other data feeds in the Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud. You can see more here.

We’ll update this post later with more statistics, including numbers from Adobe, which tracks online sales. Last year Adobe Analytics said that people in the US on Thanksgiving spent 5.6 billion dollars online, which is an increase of 5.5% from the previous year.

The economy remains shaky in many markets, so sellers are making deals so buyers can part with their money. Discounts are up to 24% worldwide and 27% in the US

Thanksgiving is shaping up to be an important mobile shopping day in the US. Many physical stores are closed, and many people are with friends and family, so people are reaching for their phones as a sneaky way to grab bargains.

Salesforce predicts that the strongest time to shop will be in the evening, after the event, with 35% of all sales occurring between 7pm and midnight. It also predicts that Thanksgiving will be the biggest mobile shopping day of the week overall, with 73% of all sales made today expected to be on mobile devices.

The Internet has led to a lot of distribution when it comes to holiday shopping. Black Friday used to be a unique American shopping experience, coming after Thanksgiving and kicking off the holiday shopping season.

Now, not only do you find “Black Friday” sales events around the world (where Thanksgiving Day is no exception for American TV specials), but those and other holiday sales days have begun to be packaged as “Cyber ​​Week”, starting days before any turkey is carved or pumpkin is minced.

Salesforce counted Tuesday of this week as the start of Cyber ​​Week, and said that sales increased by 7% and 14% respectively globally and in the US.

Sometimes it feels like we may have reached a new breakthrough when it comes to e-commerce, but artificial intelligence may have something to say about that. Salesforce said the use of digital agents and GenAI by salespeople increased by 32% compared to the previous week.

Salesforce clearly sees a business opportunity in building these AI tools and whistles, so that may be why they’re teasing out that particular detail. “Up 32%” doesn’t tell us how many actually have AI tools in place – let alone how useful they’ve been in sales conversions, or whether it’s led to people fleeing sites in frustration. We will have to see if tangible figures materialize this year.

“Holiday shopping momentum increases throughout Cyber ​​Week as more people are online and sales increase. “After waiting all year for the season’s best deals, consumers are ready for holiday shopping and flocking to their favorite sites on their mobile devices,” said Caila Schwartz, Director of Consumer Insights, Salesforce, in a statement.