With Discounts on Offer, Shoppers Seem to Bite

Early data on online spending this week shows consumers are being drawn to discounts. A clearer picture of Black Friday sales, including in-store spending, will emerge in the days ahead.

For weeks, businesses have been sending consumers endless offers of discounts on all sorts of items. Finally, on this long weekend, it appears that consumers bit.

Preliminary data released on Friday suggests that Americans took advantage of big deals on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, opening their wallets, though they were selective about what they bought.

Consumers spent $6.1 billion in online shopping on Thanksgiving, according to Adobe Analytics, around a 9 percent increase compared to last year. That was driven by large discounts on items like toys, electronics and apparel. Vivek Pandya, lead analyst for the company, said in a note that “bigger-than-expected discounts” drove higher spending.

These numbers offer an early but incomplete look at how the holiday shopping season has gone so far. The Adobe data doesn’t include in-store buying. Mastercard will release data that includes in-store sales on Saturday, and the National Retail Federation is set to update its figures on the holiday shopping season next week.

Ahead of the holiday weekend, as retailers issued forecasts for the coming months, they painted a picture of shoppers who have grown choosy, holding off on large purchases after years of faster-than-usual price increases and with interest rates still high.

“Consumers have been waiting all of 2024 for this moment to buy the goods they want and need at a lower price, and they seem to be pleased with the discounts they’re seeing this week,” said Caila Schwartz, the director of consumer insights at Salesforce, which also tracks spending data.

According to real-time data from Shopify, a provider of sales software to merchants, the top product categories by volume among its clients on Friday included items like T-shirts, skin care and makeup products, while purchases of electronics were more muted.

Anjee Solanki, the national director of retail services and practice groups at Colliers U.S., a professional services and investment management company, said that toys, beauty items, small kitchen appliances and shoes were “winners,” with discounts of 30 to 50 percent off the list price.

The National Retail Federation has projected that sales will grow 2.5 to 3.5 percent during the November and December shopping season compared with last year, but how those sales are split among retailers could be significant. Retailers that specialize in big-ticket purchases have struggled to attract price-conscious consumers, while those that offer cheaper and more essential items have thrived.

Target, for instance, which relies more on discretionary purchases than its rival Walmart, has performed more poorly in recent months than it had expected. On the company’s most recent earnings call, its executives said that consumers were choosing cheaper items like candles and vases, eschewing televisions. At the same time, analysts say that businesses that emphasize budget items, like Walmart, have been better positioned.

But the preliminary numbers for overall industry sales indicated that some consumers appeared to be making the bigger purchases that they had been holding off on.

Ms. Schwartz said that Americans had been saying for months that they were waiting until Black Friday to start making “splurge purchases.”

“The sales and order growth over the last few days implies that these shoppers stayed true to their word,” Ms. Schwartz said in a statement.

Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Analytics, said that “bigger-than-expected discounts” drove higher spending, especially as consumers remained “very conscious of prices.”

Over the past decade, Black Friday has transformed from a stand-alone day, where Americans hustled to snag the hottest new appliances and electronics at the lowest possible price, to a monthslong campaign of discounts. The ease of online shopping has meant fewer Americans go out to stores on Friday, even as it remains one of the busiest days of the year for retailers.

Proposed tariffs by President-elect Donald J. Trump may also be having an effect on consumer psychology, analysts say. Those tariffs may be spurring bigger-ticket purchases before businesses pass on heightened import costs.

Though it’s difficult to predict the precise effect of these tariffs, particularly since they are still just proposals, they may be influencing how consumers think about holiday spending, said Lars Perner, an associate professor of clinical marketing at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business.

“I would imagine that some people, worried about the massive tariffs — especially on imports from China — would take advantage of holiday bargains before costs could go up dramatically,” Dr. Perner said.