Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, so what does that mean?  It’s time for all the Ecommerce Sales Stats posts and there are a pile of them out this year!  Before we get into reviewing our stats for small merchants,  we’ll highlight some sources and the large merchant stats being reported:

Big Merchants – Ecommerce Sales

Practical Ecommerce and Demac Media cite Adobe Digital Index for their data:

• Thanksgiving sales up 25% over 2014
• Black Friday  sales up 14.3% over 2014
• Cyber Monday sales up 16% over 2014
• Average order value for all 3 days of $144

Practical Ecommerce also lists numbers from Custora, with more here, and here:

• Thanksgiving sales up 12.5%, with Average Order Value (AOV) up 1.5%
• Black Friday  sales up 16.1%, with AOV up 0.5%
• Cyber Monday sales up 16.2% with AOV up 1.6%

eMarketer has a report from comScore:

• Thanksgiving sales up 9%
• Black Friday  sales up 10%
• Cyber Monday sales up 12%
• Thanksgiving thru Cyber Monday sales up 10%

Adobe uses data from 4500+ stores for their report, including 80% of the top 100 online retailers.
Custora’s data source is a much smaller 200+ stores.
comScore doesn’t mention the number of stores sourced for their data, but they mention 2,500 clients.

Small Merchants – Same Stores Compared

Something we do differently than many holiday stats reports is we compare the same exact stores for both years to get true comparison results.  Citing an increase in sales when your data pool has changed will obviously include changes due to the different stores or just by having a larger/smaller data pool.

In our stats we’ve used data from 164 small online stores  (typically less than 10 employees) to compare the Thanksgiving holiday sales between 2014 and 2015:

• Thanksgiving sales up 21.1% over 2014
• Black Friday  sales up 31.8% over 2014
• Cyber Monday sales up 2.3% over 2014

Some additional numbers, for the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend of Thursday thru Cyber Monday:

• Average order value up 7.7%
• Total number of orders up 1.5%
• Revenue up 8.83%

Charting The Results

The Thanksgiving stats for the small stores fall nicely into the range of the large store reports.

Here our small stores greatly outperformed the larger stores on Black Friday.  This is likely due to the majority of these merchants not having a physical store for customers to shop in.  The large merchants had in-store Black Friday sales, while many small merchants were limited to just their website for Black Friday.

On Cyber Monday the large stores maintained their 10-15% increase, but the small stores had an increase of just 2.3%.  Maybe this is due to the large increase they received on Black Friday, but we have no way to be sure.

Even thought it was a small increase over 2014, Cyber Monday was still the largest shopping day of the 5 days for the small merchants.  This graph shows the percentage of sales on each day for Thursday thru Cyber Monday:

Cyber Monday had the highest with 32% of the sales, followed by Black Friday at 28%.  The remaining 3 days were almost equal, with Saturday & Sunday both at 14% and Thanksgiving coming in at 12%.

Conclusions

The small merchants don’t always follow the same trends as the larger ones, which we’ve seen in our prior reports (2014, 2013, 2012), but nothing shows that more than their stats this year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Even though they don’t follow the large merchants, their sales are still up 8.83% across the 5 day weekend, showing continued growth for small merchants.

We’ll post another report in January covering the whole shopping season to see how our small merchants fair.

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Graphs generated at https://plot.ly