Earlier this month Foursquare estimated that foot traffic to stores will be down by 3.5% during the Black Friday sales day. In a blog post Jeff Glueck, CEO of Foursquare, said:

We found that what has long been known as the biggest shopping day of the year, well, isn’t. In 2015, Black Friday saw a significant decrease in foot traffic compared to the year before; instead of wildly peaking on Black Friday, the shopping season is flattening out a bit, and other days later in the season like Super Saturday are rising in popularity. In 2014, Black Friday was the third most popular shopping day of the year. In 2015, it ranked fifth.

Now that the Black Friday has passed we are seeing reports that this prediction was largely true.

This can be explained by the growh of ecommerce sales, changing behavior of shopping, and many other shopping events available. More customers are aware of comparison shopping available online and are put off by having to walk around to find deals. While sales in stores still remain plenty, it is going to continue to decrease.

Online though, Black Friday set an estimated new record with $3.34 billion in sales, up by 22% from last year. Mobile accounted for $1.2 billion, a 33% increase from the year before.

The mobile growth is the one to pay attention to. Time spent reading long reviews and comparison shopping on mobile is less than that on desktop devices, which means that a product has to look right as fast as possible. This puts pressure on ecommerce platforms designers, but also on sellers to pick the right pictures and description, and making sure their products can be easily found.