(RTTNews) - Sunday, preliminary sales data revealed that shoppers' spending on Black Friday increased 0.5% when compared to last year, as shoppers continued to take advantage of promotions and incentives. Online shopping experienced a slowdown, although fewer websites suffered from outages.

Black Friday is the Friday following the Thanksgiving in the U.S, which marks the kick-off of the traditional Holiday shopping season.

As per initial sales data, shoppers spent $10.66 billion, up only 0.5% from the past year when sales had climbed 3% to $10.606 billion. The average amount online shoppers spent per order on Black Friday reportedly rose 35% to around $170.19 from $126.04 in the previous year. The number of items bought with each purchase also climbed year-over-year.

Online consumers were attracted by deep discounts and incentives on electronics and appliances, such as MP3 Players, Plasma & LCD TVs and GPS. The most most popular products on Black Friday 2009 included Wii Console, nuvi 265WT GPS and Apple iPod touch 8GB.

"Retailers rose to the challenge of enticing shoppers on Black Friday in a tough economy this year. They advertised a number of different incentives prior to Thanksgiving weekend, including aggressive pricing, free shipping and free accessories with a purchase," said Laura Conrad, president of PriceGrabber.com.
Further, industry data reviewed by Dow Jones showed that the use of mobile phones to make a purchase on Black Friday saw an uptrend. While the number of consumers who used mobile phones to make online payments through PayPal, an eBay unit was negligible last year, the number reportedly surged about 650%.

Keynote Competitive Research, a unit of mobile and Internet measurement solutions provider Keynote Systems (KEYN) said that almost all of the sites on its online retail shopping index revealed a slowdown on Black Friday.

Slower than usual performance was seen in Retail Web Transaction, with some sites succumbing to the Black Friday Pressure. On the whole, performance quality was better compared to last as fewer sites experienced major disruptions. Wal-Mart's site was the most stable site that did not record a single error and very little slowdown.

Among the exclusively online sites Newegg and Overstock.com performed well, while other sites struggled.

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by RTT Staff Writer

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