Adobe: Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales up 18%, iOS numbers almost triple Android’s

Thanksgiving and Black Friday online sales set a new record in 2015: $4.47 billion, up 18 percent over last year. More specifically, $1.73 billion was spent on Thanksgiving and $2.74 billion was spent online on Black Friday, further showing how the one-day shopping event has become a two-day affair.

The latest numbers come from Adobe, which today released the final totals for Thanksgiving and Black Friday (previously reported numbers were projections). The company’s figures are based on visits to 4,500 retail websites, including 80 percent of all online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers, through its Adobe Marketing Cloud.

33.2 percent of online sales came from mobile devices (compared to 27 percent in 2014), according to Adobe. As is always the case in the U.S., iOS beat out Android in mobile shopping this holiday season.

On Thanksgiving, $639 million in sales came via mobile devices: 71 percent ($456 million) via iOS and 28 percent ($180 million) via Android. On Black Friday, $905 million in sales came via mobile devices: 74 percent ($670 million) via iOS and 25 percent ($230 million) via Android.

More specifically, for Black Friday, the breakdown was as follows: $368 million spent via iPhone, $180 million via Android phones, $302 million spent via iPads, and $50 million via Android tablets. The discrepancy between Android and iOS for these numbers is often attributed to the fact that the latter has a larger market share in the U.S., as well as that iOS device owners tend to spend more than Android owners.

Adobe also shared these interesting tidbits for Black Friday:

• Discounts averaged 24 percent. Promotions via email drove 25 percent more sales than in 2014, with more than 15 percent of sales referrals. Online door buster deals accounted for 40 percent of all sales.
• 25 percent more social media buzz than last year with nearly 4 million mentions. Amazon came out on top with over half a million social media mentions, more than 2x Target and Walmart combined. Gap, with its active customer service activity on Twitter, saw the largest increase in buzz for retailers, with 250 percent year-over-year.
• Top best-selling electronic products on Black Friday were Samsung 4K TVs, Apple iPad Air2, Microsoft Xbox One, Apple iPad Mini, and Sony PS4.

Adobe also found that “out-of-stock incidents” were more than double normal levels. This may seem obvious, but apparently these were higher than originally projected, thanks to strong sales in toys, especially Star Wars items.