How did eBay and Amazon perform over Thanksgiving weekend?
eBay reports 4Q14 earnings: Investors need to watch this company in 2015 (Part 9 of 11)
Online sales rise 22% over Thanksgiving weekend
Thanksgiving weekend marks the beginning of the holiday spending period. It’s the time when retailers get about 30% of their annual sales.
According to a report from comScore, online sales rose 22% between Thanksgiving Thursday and Cyber Monday. The report covers only desktop online sales and excludes mobile online sales.
Compared to online sales, in-store sales growth was slow over the Thanksgiving period. Total in-store sales rose only 1% compared to the same period last year. The number of store visits fell 4%, according to ShopperTrak.
The main reason for slow in-store growth that weekend was because retailers pushed for early promotions and removed the focus from the traditional five-day period. Those five days include Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Cyber Monday. Collectively they’re called the Cyber Five.
ChannelAdvisor, a provider of e-commerce software solutions to retailers, tracks online sales. In December, it released its same-store sales report for the 2014 holiday season. According to the report, Amazon’s (AMZN) top growth day was Cyber Saturday when the company launched its Cyber Monday offers early. Amazon won the Cyber Five period with 23.8% year-over-year growth in sales.
eBay’s (EBAY) Cyber Five growth was 20.5%. Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Cyber Five growth came in at only 5.8%.
Mobile traffic drove holiday season traffic
Mobile sales contributed more than half of all online traffic on Thanksgiving Day. It reached an astounding 57% on Christmas Day, according to a report from IBM.
Consumers clicked on the best deals on Cyber Monday, which was again the biggest online shopping day of the year. Mobile was a strong driver of both traffic and buying, accounting for 52% of all e-commerce browsing and 32% of sales.
Smartphone penetration increases globally
According to new figures from eMarketer on mobile usage worldwide, more than 2.05 billion people will own and use smartphones by the end of 2015. This number is up more than 16% over 2014.
The increase in smartphone usage will further drive mobile traffic to online retail sites such as eBay and Amazon during the holiday season.
For a diversified exposure to eBay, investors can consider ETFs such as the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY). This ETF invests in the 500 largest US companies, and the technology sector makes up 18% weightage.
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