And breathe.

Now that the dust has settled after the Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend, we can look at the figures emerging from a number of sources to see if the four days really lived up to all the hype.

What is abundantly clear from the stats is that although overall consumer spending was down in 2015 compared to last year, the clear winner was online in both the US and UK.

Rather than face some of the chaotic scenes witnessed last year, consumers both sides of the Atlantic took to the web to seek out the best holiday deals, rather than ‘battle’ with other shoppers’ in-store.

Adobe estimated that online sales in the US hit a record $4.4 billion on Thanksgiving (a 25% increase) and Black Friday (a 14% increase) alone.

In the UK, online sales exceeded £1 billion for the first time with a 36% increase from 2014 to £1.1 billion. For the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday sales reached £3.3 billion.

Interestingly numerous sources have reported that mobile traffic represented anything from 50% to 60% of online sales.

 

Big and small retailers are the winners

 

Amazon UK was the big winner in online sales over this period as they reported sales of more than 7.4 million items on Black Friday, which represented their biggest sales day in the UK.

So, what about the smaller retailers? Leading retail Inventory Management and ERP software provider, Brightpearl has released analysis on their 1,200 customers over the holiday period.

In their blog post, Independent Retail Holiday Shopping Trends Brightpearl says that independent retailers experienced a 21% increase in gross merchandise value (GMV) growth rate from 2014 to 2015. Thanksgiving saw the largest increase with an increase of 27%.

As independent retailers increasingly have to compete with their larger competitors and they discount more and more, Brightpearl reports that average basket values decreased from $178 in 2014 to $155 in 2015.

Reflecting the dominance of Amazon, Brightpearl observed that the marketplace beat rival Ebay for the third year in a row amongst their customers. Magento (perhaps unsurprisingly) was the king of the ecommerce platforms, with Shopify second.

 

Problems for deliveries and websites

 

Despite many warnings prior to the event, many large retailers failed to maximise opportunities as unprecedented online traffic caused significant delays on websites. Both Argos and John Lewis were amongst the large scale retailers to report problems with their websites.

As we explored last month, retailers are struggling to fulfil the 22 million parcels due to be delivered post Cyber Monday. International supply chain consultants LCP Consulting has warned that 10% of home deliveries will not arrive in time as an increase of over 4 million next day deliveries from Black Friday has, inevitably put ‘additional strain’ on retailers .

Stuart Higgins, retail partner at LCP Consulting, says: “Retailers continue to pursue a faster and freer agenda which is simply placing too much pressure on their back end infrastructure and carrier partners to deliver. With one in ten deliveries risking failure this Christmas, retailers need to ensure they don’t promise what they can’t deliver or the customers will simply find a competitor who can.”

 

So, what’s next?

 

Now there’s just the small matter of Christmas to deal with.