Black Friday is term to describe the Friday that comes after Thanksgiving Day.
Celebrated in the U.S., it is used to mark the start of end of the year Christmas shopping season. During the day, stores throughout the states tend to offer huge discounts as well as promoted sales. Often, the shop are open earlier than usual, and even as early as midnight.
Black Friday occurs on every fourth Friday in November, unless November 1st is a Friday.
Since the day has been publicly known as one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the U.S., many analysis use the day to analyze trends and the economy, as well as the purchasing power of people.
And in this 2021, which happened to be on November 26th, online shoppers spent $8.9 billion during the day.
The number falls short of the $9 billion that was spent in 2020.
"For the first time ever, Black Friday saw a reversal of the growth trend of past years," said Vivek Pandya, the lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights.
"Shoppers are being strategic in their gift shopping, buying much earlier in the season and being flexible about when they shop to make sure they get the best deals."
And when shoppers did make online purchases during Black Friday, Adobe found that 44.4% of those sales were made from mobile devices, a 10.6% increase from 2020.
Adobe that conducted its own study, suggests that the downward trend could have caused by an uptick in early spending, as some stores in the U.S. started sales and promotions as early as October.
The early sales might have caused the dip.
Other reasons could include issues at the global supply chain. According to Adobe’s report, out-of-stock messages have increased by 124% since January 2020, making it harder for shoppers to get the products they want. The report notes that appliances and electronics have been affected by these issues the most.
Making things worse, the global chip shortage could also caused the issues.
And because of the issues, shoppers may prioritize visiting physical brick-and-mortar stores to increase the chances of securing gifts in time for Christmas, rather than shopping for the items online
Other cause could be the 'COVID-19' pandemic economy recovery, which may take a while to fully rebound.
During the Black Friday of 2021, most popular tech products include the Nintendo Switch and Meta (formerly Oculus) Quest 2 headset, as well as the Apple's AirPods, and the 10.2-inch iPad.
On the software side, they include Just Dance 2022, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales.
And this 2021 marks the first time ever, that spending during online Black Friday, which is traditionally one of the biggest shopping days of the year - fell.
This downward trend reversed the growth of years, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which is Adobe's business that specializes in data insights and tracks transactions at 80 of the top 100 U.S. retailers.
It's worth noting that Adobe's analysis counted 19 days where spending exceeded $3 billion, whereas in 2020, Adobe only counted five days where spending exceeded $3 billion.
It's also worth mentioning that online spending during Thanksgiving Day was flat at $5.1 billion, Adobe said.