Black Friday Sales Growth 2007 - Did You Get Yours

Nielsen Netratings released the incredible year over year growth data for Black Friday Internet sales 2007. On 11/2/2007 we blogged here about the things a webmaster should know and do to prepare for the "Holiday Rush". I really hope you were on this, and got your share of the Black Friday push on sales. Yesterday, another traditional and historical push in your sales...Cyber Monday. This is the day historically reported as a very large increase in sales, especially over the "lunch" hours of the work day. This has historically been an increase of sales numbers well over 50% for the day. Oh yeah!

2007 Black Friday Traffic Increase

*Click to enlarge the data chart.

Nice! 120 online US e commerce web sites are represented in this data. The web sites pulled an astonishing 21.2 million unique visitors, compared to 19.2 million last year. Last year the growth over 2005 Black Friday sales grew 12%, this year we add another 10% over 2006, to that explosive retail growth. This is an average of the venues you see above.

One of the things I had warned about was preparedness, and as you can see, with week over week unique visitor growth of up to 235% (electronics).....This was a genuine concern. Reportedly many sites experienced down time, and cart failures. Even sites smaller than Best Buy (reporting a week over week unique visit growth of 292%), for example were up well over 22% week to week. We are truly an electronics hungry society!

The next category, relative to electronics is computer hardware and software. The PC commerce was up 121% week over week! For example Apple Computer showed an incredible 111% growth over the previous week in their unique visits. Dell reported the smallest top 10 sites increase in uniques, with only 29%.

While these numbers are clearly astounding, please bare in mind they are not due to peak until early January! Preparedness is the key to grabbing your share. Be looking to your stats for vulnerabilities, and continue to clear the way for heavy traffic in the coming months.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough



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