Black Friday predicted to hit $5.9B in online sales, $645M spent so far

After a record-breaking Thanksgiving with $3.7 billion in digital sales across desktop and mobile devices, it looks like Black Friday will also pull in a bumper year for e-commerce. Adobe — which tracks trillions of transactions across a range of retail sites — says that as of 7am Pacific Time, there has already been $645 million spent online.

That’s not only a rise on yesterday’s sales at this point in the day — when Adobe had recorded $406 million — but a rise of some 28.3 percent on the same period a year ago. For the full day last year, shoppers spent $5.03 billion online, a record at the time; Adobe is currently predicting that this year there will be $5.9 billion spent on Black Friday.

Shopify, which provides a real-time sales visualisation for some 600,000 merchants on its platform — typically smaller retailers than the 80 biggest tracked by Adobe — notes that at the moment the average sales per minute for those merchants is hovering at just over $400,000 per minute.

Black Friday — once the traditional ‘start’ of the holiday sales period — has downshifted somewhat in importance as retailers have brought up their seasonal promotions earlier and earlier, and tapped into a growing trend of e-commerce and shopping anytime you please.

But the day still has come to represent a significant bellwether in retail, and this year’s online sales look like they will not disappoint — despite the fact that online retailers are competing head to head with brick-and-mortar offerings.

We’ll update this post more with data as we get it.