14 DAY TRIAL // Although analysts didn't have high hopes for Apple's Black Friday sales, the company's products reportedly sold well. Fortune reports that Amazon, America’s largest online retailer, saw the biggest sales. Those included quite a few Apple products.
Particularly, Apple's funnest iPod, the touch, was Amazon’s No. 1 best-selling electronics item on Friday morning. Sunday saw the Kindle reader, a Canon (CAJ) Powershot camera and a Garmin (GRMN) GPS navigator throwing the iPod touch to the fourth place. However, three of Amazon’s top 10 bestselling electronics items were Apple products. In the retailer's top 25 Black Friday products, 10 were Apple's.
Amazon’s computer department listed a $1,170 unibody MacBook as the No. 4 bestseller, with the white MacBook failing to make the top 25 bestseller list. However, by Sunday, five of the top 25 computers selling on Amazon were Apple's MacBooks. Both Amazon and eBay reported particularly strong Black Friday sales.
Still, data provided by Comscore, an Internet marketing research company, showed that for the first 28 days of the holiday, e-shopping showed considerably smaller Black Friday sales, compared to last year.
“With so much volatility right now in the variables that influence consumer spending, predicting where this online holiday season will end up has been far more challenging than in previous years,” said comScore Chairman, Gian Fulgoni. “That said, Cyber Monday may well prove to be an important indicator of whether the decline in spending that we’ve seen during the first few weeks of the online holiday season will continue for the balance of the year.”
Overall, though, things went pretty well for all retailers. “Early reports suggest that Black Friday sales in retail stores were slightly better than anticipated in this depressed retail climate, and that performance apparently extended to the online channel, which saw sales on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday combined increase 2 percent versus year ago,” added Fulgoni.
“It’s probable that on Black Friday consumers responded positively to the very aggressive promotions and discounts being offered in retail stores, so it will be important to see how they respond to similarly attractive deals being offered online on Cyber Monday, the traditional kick-off to the online holiday shopping season.”