Report: Only slight rise in Black Friday spending

Shoppers crowded stores on Black Friday but spent just a little more than last year on the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, according to data issued Saturday.

Retail spending rose a slight 0.3 percent, to $10.69 billion, compared with $10.66 billion on the day after Thanksgiving last year, according to the Chicago research firm ShopperTrak.

Two factors behind the slim increase, a disappointment following bullish reports from stores Friday, were heavy discounts earlier in November and a big rise in online spending.

ShopperTrak, which tallies sales in more than 70,000 retail outlets across the country, said the total was still a record for the day. It stood behind its prediction for spending to rise 3.2 percent for the season.

"It's hard to say Black Friday wasn't a success, it's just not the success we saw in the mid-2000s, when the day really became a phenomenon," ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin said.

The slim sales increase came despite a 2.2 percent boost in store traffic, which Martin said suggests that consumers were in the stores searching for deals.

ShopperTrak said spending for the first two weeks of the month rose 6.1 percent over last year, as retailers promoted doorbuster deals earlier than usual. Traffic in stores the two weeks ended Nov. 13 jumped 6.2 percent.

"Retailers were very conscious of driving traffic early in November and in doing so, some might have thinned Black Friday spending a bit," Martin said.

Many retailers also offered those discounts and promotions on their websites. Online merchants saw a 16 percent revenue spike Friday, according to Web research company Coremetrics.

That increase came partly from shoppers who spent more per online purchase, Coremetrics said. The average order rose to $190.80, up 12 percent from $170.19 on the same day last year.

The solid increase followed a 33 percent online spending spike on Thanksgiving Day.

"The season's off to a great start," said John Squire of Coremetrics, adding it shows "really strong consumer sentiment for buying and for going online."

Meanwhile, PayPal reported an increase of about 27 percent in payment volume on Black Friday compared with last year. It did not release a dollar amount for the sales it processed.

Shopping on smartphones remained a small, though growing, piece of the pie. Coremetrics said about 5.6 percent of people logged on to a retailer's website using a mobile device, compared with less than 1 percent on last year's Black Friday.

More dollars have shifted to online shopping over the years - many shoppers do their browsing online - but it's still a relatively small share of holiday spending: 8 percent to 10 percent.

Black Friday is generally not as big for online retailers as the Monday after Thanksgiving. Known as "Cyber Monday," Coremetrics predicts that day will be the busiest online shopping day of the year, driven by heavy online promotions.