Black Friday Sales 2012

Online sales so far for the holiday 2007 season have far surpassed most sales forecasts. Retailer’s numbers are up, some as high as 50% from last year. A stronger than expected Black Friday and increasing sales volume for Cyber Monday helped fuel the strong sales.

Retailers should be excited about their online efforts because Black Friday and Cyber Monday are only the start to the online holiday shopping season. The strongest sales online occur in the middle of December as Christmas creeps closer and people need to have the presents ordered by a certain date to have them delivered on time for Christmas. Sales are expected to last even later in to this years shopping season because there is an extra Monday for ordered gifts to arrive.

The big hurdle of the shopping season to date was on Cyber Monday when Yahoo Checkout stopped functioning for about 400 online retailers. Yahoo has fixed the problem and Christmas and holiday shopping seem to be running smoothly.

The big winners among online retailers in terms of traffic and sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday go to Walmart, Amazon.com and the QVC Empire. All received historic levels of traffic and sales over the past week.