Black Friday has come and gone and tomorrow is Cyber Monday. So, let’s take a minute and see how the holiday season looks so far and how the holiday weekend fared.
To start with, all seems right with the world, Michigan beat Ohio State this weekend in an exciting football game in front of over 114,000 people at Michigan Stadium (“The Big House”) in Ann Arbor, and instead of dealing with the typical gray and cold November sky, we got 60 degrees of warmth.
Now back to the holiday season.
comScore reports online commerce on Black Friday was up 26% over last year. A great start to the online holiday season. Last year they reported a 9% increase over the prior year. So far, so good. Anecdotally there seemed to be more holiday sales and they seemed to start earlier this year than prior years. We also saw a little more coordination between online and offline, although still many sites had their online specials and their offline specials.
Have you been online this holiday season? Have your expectations been met? Satisfaction drives success, both short term and long term. Satisfaction comes from both your experiences and your expectations. Did the experiences you had live up to the expectations you had?
The National Retail Federation is reporting that Black Friday brought $52.4 billion in sales during the four day weekend, up from $45 billion last year, an increase of 16%. It was also reported that shoppers average spend increased to $398 from $356 last year, an increase of nearly 12%.
So far we know that the holiday season has been a success to the retailers. We will be digging into the Satisfaction data this week to better understand how successful the beginning of the holiday season is from the consumer’s perspective.
