Black Friday hits $6.2B in US online sales

Online spending on Thanksgiving Day hit a new record in a surge that’s carrying over to today’s Black Friday sales, according to Adobe Systems Inc. data.

The company, best known as the maker of Photoshop, also has a sizable digital marketing business that serves numerous major retailers. Adobe claims to have collected more than a trillion data points from 80 of the top 100 U.S. e-commerce websites for its report.

The company puts the total value of online sales on Thanksgiving Day at $3.7 billion. That marks a new record and represents a 28 percent increase over last year, according to the report. Much of the growth came from mobile users, who Adobe estimates accounted for more than 50 percent of traffic to e-commerce sites and nearly 37 percent of total sales. The company said this officially made Thanksgiving the first day of 2018 to see more than $1 billion in purchases placed via smartphones.

Adobe’s data seems to be show the momentum is continuing into today. As of 7 a.m. PST, consumers spent $643 million online. That exceeds spending figures from the same point yesterday and represents a 28 percent jump over the morning sales data the company shared for Black Friday last year. The technology giant believes that online spending is track to hit $6.4 billion by the end of the day.

That’s good news for Amazon.com Inc., which controls nearly half of the U.S. e-commerce market as of July. Trade publication Internet Retailer sees the company capturing a full third of the $21.6 billion it projects consumers to spend between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, this coming Monday.

Amazon is benefiting from its leadership position abroad as well. Black Friday, an event once limited almost exclusively to the U.S., has started spreading to international markets in recent years. Amazon told CNBC early this morning that it’s seeing consumers in the U.K. shopping at “record levels,” with 100,000 toys and 60,000 beauty items ordered since midnight.