NPD noted that all consumer electronics sales  in the US — not including Amazon Kindles, iPads, Microsoft Surface, or any phones or video games — were 6 percent lower than Black Friday last year.

From NPD’s report:

Notebook PCs continued their year long struggle as units fell 10 percent, with sales of Apple notebooks flat and Windows notebooks down 10 percent. Windows 8 represented 89 percent of notebook sales with an ASP of $368, and touchscreens accounted for 3 percent of sales with an ASP of $668.

Apple’s Black Friday discounts were relatively minor this year, as usual: a $1,699 Retina MacBook Pro, a $1,199 MacBook Pro and a $999 MacBook Air were each discounted $101. Black Friday is about finding the best deals, and Apple does not take the opportunity to draw customers in with mega price slashing. That said, Black Friday is the one time per year Apple offers any discounts for new products at all.

Still, Mac OS X based laptops did better than their Windows counterparts: Windows laptop sales declined 10 percent compared to the same day last year — and that’s despite Windows 8′s recent arrival.

In both cases, it’s important to note that this report doesn’t tell us anything about how often customers chose a tablet over either a Mac or Windows laptop, since the report doesn’t include iPad or Surface sales. Apple, for its part, isn’t likely to sweat this news too much: CEO Tim Cook has been open about the fact that cannibalization among his products is a real thing, and that some customers are in fact buying an iPad instead of a MacBook.

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Deepfield, which offers services to build, manage and optimize network infrastructure, studied online shopping infrastructure by sampling internet backbone traffic across a “large cross section of North America and multiple collaborating infrastructure and internet providers.” The goal: To estimate how many users hit these sites daily and determine market share of the sites based on those numbers.

According to Deepfield’s results:

“What is truly impressive is how much larger Amazon shopping is compared to any other online site. Amazon is almost double the next largest shopping competitor, eBay, which enjoys 8.8% of daily Internet users.”

With Amazon, Deepfield includes a raft of smaller Amazon-owned sub-sites like MyHabit, although Zappos, which Amazon bought two years ago, was counted separately.

Deepfield included e-commerce hosting sites — including Shopify — to show how vibrant this market is. Shopify, which offers a web storefront that is used by more than 30,000 sites, garnered 5.4 percent market share among daily users. Quidsi, the company behind diapers.com, soap.com and other sites, also got a healthy 3.1 percent of daily visitors, and was also bought by Amazon in 2010.

Update: (12:45 p.m. PST) The results are summarized in the updated Deepfield chart below:

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Shlomi Fish

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Amazon

Kindle Fire, 7-inch (reg. $159)

• Best Buy : with $30 Best Buy gift card, $159.99 (11/22-11/24, stores only)
• Office Depot : with $25 Visa gift card, $159.99 (11/23 to 11/24, stores only)
• Staples : with $20 Staples gift card after rebate, $159 (11/23, 5 a.m. to 12 p.m., stores only)

Kindle Fire HD, 7-inch, 16 GB (reg. $199)

• Best Buy: with $30 Best Buy gift card, $199.99 (11/22-11/24, stores only)
• OfficeMax : With $25 OfficeMax gift card, $199 (11/23, 12 a.m. to 12 p.m.)
• Staples: With $20 Staples gift card after rebate, $199 (11/23, 5 a.m. to 12 p.m., stores only)

Kindle Fire HD, 7-inch, 32 GB (reg. $249)

• Staples: With $20 Staples gift card after rebate, $249 (11/23, 5 a.m. to 12 p.m., stores only)

Apple

Any iPad except iPad Mini

• Target: List price, with $60 Target gift card, (11/22, 9 p.m. to 11/24, 11 p.m.)

iPad 2, 16 GB, WiFi (reg. $399)

• Walmart : With $75 Walmart gift card, $399 (11/22, 10 p.m. to 11/23, 11 p.m.)

iPad 3, 32 GB, WiFi (reg. $599)

• Best Buy: With $75 Best Buy gift card, $549.99 (11/21, online only)

iPad 3, 64 GB, WiFi (reg. $699)

• Best Buy: With $75 Best Buy gift card, $649.99 (11/21, online only)

Barnes & Noble

Nook Simple Touch e-reader (reg. $99.99)

• Barnes & Noble: $59 (11/23, stores only)
• Sears: $39.99 (from 11/22 at 8 p.m. until 11/23 at 1 p.m.)
• Target: $49 (from 11/22 at 9 p.m. until 11/24 at 11 p.m.)

Nook Tablet, 8 GB (reg. $159)

• Walmart: $99 (from 11/22 at 10 p.m. until 11/23 at 11 p.m., stores only)

Google

Nexus 7, 32 GB (reg. $249.99)

• Office Depot: $229.99

Kobo

Kobo Mini (reg. $79.99)

• Best Buy: $49.99 (11/23, stores only)
• Independent bookstores: Independent bookstores that belong to the American Booksellers Association will sell the Kobo Mini e-reader for $49.99. Here’s a list of participating bookstores. (11/23 to 11/24, stores only)

Samsung

Galaxy Tab 2, 8 GB (reg. $249.99)

• Best Buy: $179.99, “exclusive white color,” includes $20 Best Buy gift card (11/23 to 11/24, stores only)
• Office Depot: $179.99 (11/23 to 11/24, stores only)
• Sears: $177.99 (11/22 at 8 p.m. through 11/24, stores and online)
• Staples: $179.99 (11/23 to 11/24, stores only)

Amazon Kindle ebooks

Amazon is bringing back 25 of its most popular Kindle Daily Deals, 5 each in 5 categories (biography/memoir, literature/fiction, romance, mystery/thriller and science fiction), for Black Friday. See deals starting 11/23 at 12 a.m. PST here.

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Everyone knows about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but did you know December. 21 will be a big online traffic day next year?

Here, most courtesy of data center power Equinix, are other  big data and heavy traffic dates to prep for, in chronological order:

February 5: Super Sunday,  Super Bowl XLVI. This year, the big event will even be live streamed! Need I say more?

February 12: The 84th Annual Academy Awards. Eddie Murphy fans may stay away; the rest of the world will show up. Always a big event.

March 6: Super Tuesday. With seven primaries and two caucuses slated, Super Tuesday will be a big day, even if pundits are already calling it “less super than usual,” since many states have accelerated (and some have moved back) their primaries in hopes of maximizing clout.

April 29: The first anniversary of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Gird yourself for the memorial plates. The main event last April may not have broken the Internet, but it certainly did break records.

July 27: Opening day of the London Summer Olympics. Or “The Games of the XXX Olympiad” as they would doubtless prefer to be known. The games will run until August 12, so brace yourself for a brisk mid-summer.

August 27-30: The Republican National Convention. Doubtful this will come close to the 2008 Obama inauguration stats, but political junkies will be online in force. Last time around, the traffic to sites like the fivethirtyeight blog was off the charts.

Sept. 3 through 6: The Democratic National Convention. There won’t be a nominee fight, but the true political fanatics will still tune in. (See above.)

Nov. 6: Election Day. After all the build up, including the seemingly endless Republican debates, you’d think people would stay away. But they won’t.

November 23. Okay, so Black Friday this year was a shadow of its former self, ceding top shopping spot to Thanksgiving, but it’ll still be a day to reckon with. Old habits die hard.

November 26: Cyber Monday.  Also had an off year in 2011, but it could regroup in 2012.

December 21. For those out of the loop, Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end of the world per the Mayan calendar.

Wildcard dates: Then there are some events we know are coming but can’t narrow them down yet. As in:

• The Apple iPad 3 launch.
• The Apple iPhone 5 launch.

On the other hand, there isn’t a World Cup this year, so we’ll be spared that crush.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elmo H. Love

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Will this year be the one when turkey day beats out Cyber Monday? We will have to wait a few more hours to find out. But the loss of Cyber Monday, which got its name when most people had to go into their offices to shop online, shows how far broadband, and now mobile, have come.

Wikipedia notes that Shop.org was the first to use the term Cyber Monday back in 2005, but the phenomenon of increased web traffic had been noted by retailers a year or two prior. In 2003, only 20 percent of U.S. homes had broadband connections, a figure that stands at 68 percent today. But in the past few years, as Cyber Monday traffic has bled back into Black Friday and even the two days of the weekend, the smartphone has changed the holiday landscape even more.

So while PayPal is reporting that it’s seeing six times the traffic on Monday than it did last year, it’s the Akamai data around traffic generated on Thanksgiving that catches my eye. Much like last year, it seems consumers aren’t waiting for any industry-mandated shopping day to submit their credit cards online. Thanksgiving itself experienced 70 percent growth traffic, according to Akamai, which saw a peak traffic of about 2 million page views per minute on Thanksgiving evening, the peak so far for this shopping season.

Is it mobile or marketing?

Akamai reports that on Black Friday, it counted 1.6 page views per minute during its peak at 12 a.m. EST, and overall, Black Friday traffic was up by 43 percent. But note that when Akamai saw the peak, it was still 9 p.m. on the West Coast, which means shoppers were hopping online on Thanksgiving Day itself. Perhaps this was because they were on the couch after their meals or maybe because the promotions were too good to pass up?

Akamai saw a peak of 1.6 million page views per minute as of about 2 p.m. EST and wrote on its blog that Cyber Monday would surpass Black Friday as the peak traffic shopping day so far this season and should do so sometime Monday night. Once again, the office isn’t the place to shop online anymore. Akamai is waiting to see if Cyber Monday will beat the Thanksgiving peak.

More people, fewer problems, faster sites

No matter when people hopped online, there were more of them and the sites ran faster. Web tracking by SmartBear on Black Friday shows that retailers’ sites were about 30 percent faster as of Nov. 25 than they were throughout all the previous holiday seasons. According to data from SmartBear, which provides metrics on site performance, sites that took 20.83 seconds to load during the holiday last year took only 14.67 seconds on Black Friday itself. Target, The Gap and Toys “R” Us experienced some issues but more so on Thanksgiving as opposed to the day after.

Akamai said last year’s global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at noon EST on Black Friday, which makes this year’s peak 20 percent higher. On Cyber Monday 2010, global retail traffic peaked at 1.3 million page views per minute at 1 p.m. EST, while this year, we’re still waiting.

This is good news for retailers who feel the pinch of lost revenue when customers can’t shop online, but it’s also good for consumers who are impatient to buy their merchandise and get on with their lives — even for those who are increasingly using mobile devices to shop while possibly doing other things. As Ryan Kim says in his article on Monday morning:

JP Morgan noted a Shop.org survey over the weekend that found almost 15 percent of respondents will shop on a smartphone or tablet on Cyber Monday, compared to 6.9 percent who did so last year. IBM Coremetrics said sales on mobile devices for Black Friday increased to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year.

So more of us are online, using mobile device as well as our PCs, while the web keeps getting faster. Looks like holiday shopping mirrors the broadband experience as a whole.

For those who care how their favorite retailer fared the onslaught, below is SmartBear’s chart on how various online merchants performed on Friday. “RT” is response time.

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Historically, the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday has set the pace for the rest of the holiday shopping season. Last year, we processed more than half a million transactions on Cyber Monday for our retailers. From a same-store sales perspective, we’re already trending up 40 percent this year.

So, what have we seen from the holiday so far? First off, we’ve noticed the front-loading of the holiday season. Retailers have been gradually advancing their holiday promotions into early November. For the first time, we even saw a few “Black Friday in October” promotions. It appears to be working. Our retailers’ sales in November were up 28 percent over November 2010. As for the holiday season to date, we saw growth on all online channels, with most channels steadily increasing throughout the holiday weekend. In comparison, sales spiked on Thanksgiving and Black Friday last year and then dipped over the weekend only to spike again on Cyber Monday. This gradual climb (see chart below) suggests that Cyber Monday sales growth will continue on an accelerated pace.

Another trend we’re watching is growth across online channels. The channels we track include eBay, Amazon, comparison shopping engines (CSEs), paid search, and the total e-commerce sales across all these channels. As you can see in the chart above, Amazon completely ran away with sales Thursday through Sunday, only accelerating as the weekend went on. Here at ChannelAdvisor, we processed the highest amount of Amazon sales in company history on Saturday, even beating out Cyber Monday of 2010. We’re tracking the Amazon numbers today to see if we’ll set another record. As of noon ET, we are up 51 percent on Amazon.

Mobile commerce is another trend that has really made its mark this season, specifically with tablets. This is the first year we’ve tracked conversions on smartphones and tablets. With 10 percent of sales for our paid search customers, “couch commerce” was the big winner for Thanksgiving Day. Prior to Thanksgiving, 7 percent was the highest sales we’d seen in that area.

Purchases on tablets specifically accounted for nearly 8 percent of sales on Thanksgiving Day. On Black Friday, we saw a higher volume of sales through mobile devices than on Thanksgiving Day, which we’ve interpreted as an indication that more shoppers were using their smartphones to compare prices on the go and make mobile purchases.

The final trend we’re watching is overall macro growth of e-commerce this holiday season, especially with all the negative news headlines about the looming threat of the European debt crisis and increased unemployment rates. Despite this, we’ve predicted growth of 17 percent, with comScore and Forrester each forecasting 15 percent growth. As of the writing of this blog post, our customers’ e-commerce same-store sales started with 17 percent growth on Thanksgiving Day, followed by 20 percent growth on Black Friday, 21 percent growth on Saturday and 27 percent on Sunday — so we’re on the right track to hit that 17 percent mark.

Scot Wingo is the CEO of ChannelAdvisor, a software and services company that aims to help retailers reach customers through multiple marketplaces, paid search opportunities, and comparison shopping sites. More than 3,000 retailers use ChannelAdvisor’s software to manage e-commerce channels, such as paid search (Google, Yahoo!), comparison shopping engines (PriceGrabber, NexTag, TheFind.com, Shopping.com), and marketplaces (eBay, Amazon).

Image courtesy of Flickr user 401K.

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comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) has released its figures noting that Black Friday sales — the day after Thanksgiving that has come to mark the start of holiday shopping — were up 26 percent compared to the same day a year ago.

In total, comScore said that some $816 million was spent online in the U.S. on the Friday, the biggest day yet in holiday season shopping (comScore records from the beginning of November). To date, some $12.7 billion has been spent online, an increase of 15 percent on the same month a year ago.

What’s not clear is whether that growth in online shopping was reflected in physical, retail shopping, too — or whether more dollars are pouring into online at the expense of brick-and-mortar operations. In years past, online sales were usually shifted to “Cyber Monday” where retailers would push online deals to coincide with people returning to work but still wanting to shop for the holidays. Now the two periods seem to be merging ever closer together.

While the holiday shopping season is usually geared to physical goods, what’s notable in the top-ten most popular gadget buys from Thanksgiving weekend, is that they also point to a much larger proliferation of devices geared at consuming more digital content.

In a list compiled by PriceGrabber, a division of Experian, lists the usual suspects of Sony’s PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii; while Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is the single-most mentioned brand, with three products in the top ten (iPod, MacBook Pro, and iPad 2).

Some other notable highlights:

Amazon: comScore noted that Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) was the most-visited online retailer so far this year, with 50 percent more visits than its nearest online competitor, Walmart — those rankings do not include auction sites like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY). Amazon, meanwhile, itself today noted that this year has been their best-ever for Kindle sales, which sold four times as many as it has on any other Black Friday. As usual, Amazon has not given a figure on how many Kindles that means, exactly, or how well, say, the Kindle Fire tablet has been selling compared to the basic $79 Kindle device. Nor is it clear where those Kindles are getting bought: Amazon sells them online through its own portal, but also through 16,000 retail locations.

B&N: For balance, it’s worth pointing here that Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) has not released any numbers on sales of the Nook over Thanksgiving weekend, but it has today announced a deal whereby those who buy any Nook device gets a $25 gift card, usable for either books or Nook accessories.

eBay/PayPal: Although it was overlooked in comScore’s retail rankings, the auction giant’s payment service PayPal noted a big rise in shopping activity, too, particularly on the mobile platform that working hard to promote these days. There, it says it had a six-fold increase, to 516 percent, in mobile payments volumes on Black Friday compared to the same day a year ago. Customer numbers were up four-fold (371 percent). Like Amazon, the company does not give us that number in actual terms.

eBay’s mobile site, meanwhile, received a bump, too. The number of items purchased on Black Friday was up 2.5 times. GSI Commerce, the eBay company that runs online shopping sites for brick-and-mortar retailers, noted a 254 percent increase in sales via mobile on Black Friday as well. Milo.com, which is eBay’s service that lets consumers compare prices for an item across local stores before purchasing, was also up 692 percent. In other words, the kind of high growth that you see when a service is still relatively new but of interest to consumers.

More on the mobile factor: Even if you combine the number of people using mobile sites to supplement physical shop visits with those that buy directly from mobile devices, mobile commerce still represents a small part of holiday shopping, but its role is growing, and fast: IBM Coremetrics noted a rise in both areas. The number of those using mobiles for research went up to 14.3 percent from 5.6 percent a year ago. Sales, however, remained in single digits, at 9.8 percent versus 3.2 percent in 2010.

The researchers noted that Apple’s iPhone and iPad were the two most-common devices used for mobile commerce in the period, respectively at 5.4 percent and 4.8 percent respectively (meaning that together they accounted for ten percent of all online sales on Black Friday). Android was the third most-used mobile platform at 4.1 percent. Interestingly, it looks like the iPad is also a more sticky device — either that, or iPads belong to people who are more serious online buyers: the conversion rate for those browsing on iPads is 4.6 percent compared to an average of 2.8 percent on other mobile devices, the researches said.

But there is still a long way to go to make the mobile experience more engaging and effective. IBM Coremetrics noted that the “bounce rate” on mobile devices was 41.3 percent compared to 33.1 percent for general online shopping: that means people are visiting one page and leaving before exploring any further — and like a restaurant customer nibbling on an appetizer instead of gorging on a full meal, that makes for bad business in the longer run.

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Channel Advisor data shows that both Amazon and eBay are seeing an upswing in demand on their marketplaces, while eBay has seen a sharp uptick in the fixed price sales.

• Overall Thanksgiving 2011 is trending 15% higher than 2010
• Marketplaces were up 14%
• Search is up 13%
• CSE is up 1%

Within marketplaces:

• eBay is up 7%
• Amazon is up 27%

Within eBay, some trends:

• Auctions were down 37% (makes sense as Auctions are not a great format for holiday shopping – you want to know you are going to get something vs. waiting 7 days)
• Fixed price was up 13%
• Parts and Accessories were up 25%

Data from eBay itself shows a strong start.

• The amount shoppers in the U.S. spent via eBay Mobile more than doubled this Thanksgiving over last year.
• GSI Commerce announced a more than three-fold (345%) increase in U.S. mobile sales this Thanksgiving compared to 2010.
• Searches through the Milo.com platform increased 557% percent over Thanksgiving Day 2010.Milo.com powers eBay’s local shopping and enables shoppers to check a product’s local availability and price from home.

On PayPal side of the house, eBay says that:

• PayPal Mobile saw a five-fold (511%) increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010.
• There was a more than three-fold (350%) increase in the number of global customers shopping through PayPal mobile on Thanksgiving 2011 compared to last year.

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12.45 PM: Akamai retail traffic up 76% (from 2010) on average at 9PM EST last night: Thanksgiving might be star of the shopping weekend.

12.39 PM: What gadgets and gifts are going to be hot, according to Red Laser. iPad seems to be leading.

8.26 AM: Channel Advisor Early Read on the market:

Here are the early results:

• Overall Thanksgiving 2011 is trending 15% higher than 2010
• Marketplaces were up 14%
• Search is up 13%
• CSE is up 1%

Within marketplaces:

• eBay is up 7%
• Amazon is up 27%

Within eBay, some trends:

• Auctions were down 37% (makes sense as Auctions are not a great format for holiday shopping – you want to know you are going to get something vs. waiting 7 days)
• Fixed price was up 13%
• Parts and Accessories were up 25%

8.29 AM: Obama 2010 gear is on sale today. Seriously!!!

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The images posted by 9to5Mac appear to be from an internal staff leaflet or flyer detailing the Apple Store’s Black Friday deals. In addition to the Mac sales (which are actually pretty good at $100 off even the cheapest models), a lot of accessories are on sale, including Apple’s own iPad Smart Cover ($11 off all models), wireless input devices ($11 off keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad) and networking devices ($11 to $51 off AirPort and Time Capsule hardware).

But some of the standouts include sales on products that, while excellent, are normally out of reach for a lot of consumer budgets (mine included). For instance, the Jambox by Jawbone gets a $51.95 discount, making the Bluetooth speaker only $148 on sale. Jawbone’s breakout hit, the fitness tracking UP wristband, is also significantly cheaper according to the spy shots, getting a $21.95 temporary price drop. Bowers & Wilkins’ excellent C5 stereo headset, which we recently picked as the best overall iPhone headphone companion, is on sale for $128, a full $51.95 off its original price, and the same company’s Zeppelin Air, which is the best and brightest of the AirPlay speaker lot, hovers a little closer to being affordable thanks to a $101.95 price break, making it ‘only’ $498.

I may not have expressed much enthusiasm about Apple’s Black Friday sales in the past, but if this flyer turns out to be accurate I’ll be singing a different tune. Deals on high-end Apple accessories don’t come along often enough, and wireless, room-filling sound just might be worth waiting in line for. Check out the full flyer snapshot at 9t05Mac and let us know if anything catches your eye.

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