If you are in the consumer retail space, you tend to pay attention to Black Friday.  That’s the day where supposedly, your company goes into the black.  It is the day after Thanksgiving. 

This year, there was considerably more interest in Black Friday because analysts believe that volume on Black Friday is a good barometer for predicting the season’s sales and future economic activity with consumer spending.  The news is mixed.

If you are an online retailer, things looked relatively good.  Pricegrabber reported that sales were up 11%.  Pricegrabber is a comparison shopping engine.  Many of their customers use cookies to track sales and report them back to Pricegrabber for analytics purposes. As a result, their information should be pretty accurate.

Another online source, Comscore, reported that sales were actually up by 1%.  Comscore uses sampling to make statistical conclusions.  My guess is that their data is probably not as good as Pricegrabber’s but they can measure a different audience that perhaps doesn’t use Pricegrabber so it is helpful to look at Comscore as well.

As for Cyber Monday, the news is similar.  Comscore reported that sales were up 9%.  Channel Advisor reported a 15% jump.  On the low end, The New York Times reported sales were only up 1%.  They wrote that volume was up by 14% but the average sale was down.

OK, now the bad news.  Apparently, Fraud is up 40%.  This was reported by Retail Decisions.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, fraud is horrible.  It can really cripple a company and all of us end up paying the costs.  On the other hand, the fraud tools available today are pretty good and getting better.  I hope that fraud is one day eliminated from the web.

Now the really bad news.  According to the NPD Group.  Sales at traditional bricks and mortar stores was down 8%.  This is actually even worse than you might imagine because this year, the holiday shopping season is one week less than last year.  You would naturally expect that since the season is shorter, more people would be shopping on the few days allowed.  That didn’t happen.

As for my company, CableOrganizer.com, our sales were up 17%.  Care to share your results?

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