With the year's busiest shopping days now behind us, early reports on holiday spending are coming out. Although many analysts expect a slow season (especially for tech), it seems sales have been at least mildly positive for e-commerce, with some reporting decent figures for Black Friday.
PayPal for instance witnessed a 27% on-year increase in payment volume on Black Friday and a whopping 310% jump in overall mobile shopping. For comparison's sake, transactions rose 19% over the typical Friday in 2010. Most of that activity occurred between 9AM and 10AM PST.
PayPal partly attributes that increase to the bruised economy. That sounds a little backwards, but PayPal senior director Amanda Pires explains that "the tough economy has made shoppers more price-conscious, and this year's Black Friday results show that they're going online to find the best deals."
Unsurprisingly, the most popular items purchased on eBay (owner of PayPal) included Microsoft's Kinect for the Xbox 360 with an average selling price of $228, as well as Apple's iPad and iPhone 4, which sold for $650 and $724 on average. Did you buy any tech items during Black Friday or Cyber Monday?