Black Friday Sales Results 2020

Note: these are obviously only "estimates".  This is regarding all product, NOT only fashion.

Retailers started to kick off the Black Friday deals early.  Some starting in October.

Consumers spent $9 billion on the web the day after Thanksgiving, up 21.6% year over year, according to data from Adobe Analytics.  The pandemic pushed more shoppers to stay home and shop online from their sofas, avoiding crowded stores and waiting in lines at malls.

• Adobe Analytics: discover consumer spending trends to understand how they are buying this season.  This year, customers will do a lot more than window shop, so Adobe is gathering the data and statistics and putting the insights on display. Download the Holiday Forecast 2021 report to understand when, how, and what consumers plan to spend money on this season, 

This makes Black Friday 2020 the second-largest online spending day in history in the United States (Cyber Monday previous year was higher).

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic Black Friday saw a decrease in regard to "in-store" sales volume.

2020 was a record-breaking year for online shopping: 100 million consumers shopped online (up 8% YoY). Meanwhile, there was a huge drop in in-person Black Friday shopping -- 58.7 million hit the stores on Black Friday (down 37% YoY). On Thanksgiving Day, the drop in in-person shopping was even more pronounced, due to major retailers being closed -- foot traffic dropped 55% YoY (2020 vs. 2019).

• Source: National Retail Federation 2020 data (NFR)

100 Million Online, 58.7 Million in Stores

The National Retail Federation's 2020 data quantifies the stay-home shift: 100 million consumers shopped online, up 8 percent year over year, while in-person Black Friday shopping dropped to 58.7 million people, down 37 percent. On Thanksgiving Day the in-person drop was even more pronounced, with foot traffic down 55 percent year over year as major retailers stayed closed. The two movements are the same behavior measured twice — households substituting the sofa for the store line — and they explain how the day could set an online record while feeling empty at the mall, a combination the 2017 report had previewed in milder form when stores first looked emptier while sales soared.

Adobe's framing of the season, preserved in the coverage links, had forecast the behavior: customers doing far more than window shopping, with data and statistics gathered to show when, how and what consumers planned to spend on. Read with the 2019 results and the 2021 results in this series, 2020 is the discontinuity year — the online share did not merely grow, it absorbed the store decline in a single season, and the early-October deal starts that year previewed the permanently elongated holiday calendar the later reports describe. All figures here are estimates covering all products, not only fashion.

How to Read This Report

The $9 billion is Black Friday day online spending in Adobe's panel, comparable to the $5.03 billion of 2017 and $6.22 billion of 2018 in the same series. The NRF consumer counts measure people, not dollars, and count online and in-person shoppers separately, so a household that did both appears in both populations. Year-over-year percentages for 2020 carry the pandemic base effect in both directions: online growth against a normal 2019, in-person decline against the same normal base.