Who won Black Friday? The retailers that started sales early! Slice Intelligence online sales data reveals that Black Friday was a weeklong event this year. While Black Friday was the biggest online shopping day of the year, sales grew more modestly than they did on the days leading up to Black Friday. This year, Black Friday sales increased seven percent, while sales the weeks leading up to Black Friday grew by 14 percent; peaking on the day before Thanksgiving. 
 
 Shoppers shifted their buying behavior as many retailers, including Target and Walmart, offered door buster deals online nearly a full week early. November 25th, the day before Thanksgiving, experienced 20 percent growth over the same day last year, followed by Thanksgiving Day, which posted 16 percent more sales versus Turkey Day 2014. 
 
 The online average order size was $42.90––which is one dollar less than their 2014 door buster spend. The retailer with the most Black Friday gains was Wayfair, whose sales were a whopping 315 percent higher than Black Friday last year. But will the momentum from the retailer’s Black Friday discounts and free shipping over $49 carry through the rest of the shopping season? 
 
 Generational shopping trends hold true, baby boomers still spend the most 
 
 While holiday spending is evenly distributed between millennials, baby boomers, and Gen X; baby boomers took the largest share, at about 33 percent; up from 31 percent of Black Friday sales last year. We observe this demographic trend throughout the year. With the exception of the Silent Generation, spending is evenly distributed across age groups. 
 
 Slice Intelligence will continue to report daily updates throughout the holiday shopping season. Come back here for the latest in online shopping trends. 
 
 about this data 
 
 With a panel of over three million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily. 
 
 Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases. 
 
 Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. ||||| Slice Intelligence, which gathers e-commerce data from receipts linked to its Slice package tracking app, tells TechCrunch that Amazon dominated online Black Friday sales, accounting for 35.7 percent in e-commerce spending on November 27. A distant second, Best Buy brought in 8.23 percent of total online revenue, followed by Macy’s at 3.38 percent, Walmart at 3.35 percent and Nordstrom at 3.11 percent. 
 
 It’s hard to say whether these impressive Amazon numbers are skewing high because Slice’s users are more active online shoppers, but Amazon did post a release, touting its own success. While the e-commerce giant is mum on actual sales numbers, it said that had a record year for Amazon-branded products. 
 
 Slice also estimated that online Black Friday sales rose 7 percent, and that the preceding days saw a 14 percent uptick, due to sales starting early. The data showed that home furnishings site Wayfair saw the greatest rise in Black Friday spending, up 315 percent year-over-year. 
 
 The sales continued over the weekend and through “Cyber Monday,” with eBay showcasing a 12 percent increase in mobile spending during Cyber Weekend. 
 
 “Mobile has put shoppers in the driver’s seat this year, and they expect great deals and gift ideas throughout the holiday season, rather than just on individual days,” Jay Hanson, VP of Merchandising at eBay tells TechCrunch. 
 
 The company said it sold 7,000 ExxonMobile gift cards (uh, Merry Xmas), 7,500 hoverboards and that its top-selling toy was a robot. 
 
 PayPal, which recently separated from eBay, saw so much online traffic, that it temporarily experienced an outage on Cyber Monday. 
 
 The payments company tells TechCrunch that it also saw an uptick on mobile spending, particularly an increase in fashion buys. Electronics, cosmetics and toys were also popular app purchases. 
 
 “PayPal data shows that the holiday shopping season now starts on Sept 30th, two months before Black Friday,” Anuj Nayar, Sr. Director Global Initiatives at PayPal, tells TechCrunch. “While Cyber Monday is still PayPal’s busiest day of the year for online shopping as a whole, more and more people are shopping from their mobile devices after their turkey dinner on Thanksgiving.” 
 
 While many of the holiday sales numbers are staggering, BlueSnap and PYMNTS released a study that said that retailers could be selling a whole lot more. Their findings suggest that companies are missing out on as much as 36 percent in online sales due to “checkout frictions,” such as the buying process taking too long. 
 
 “They’re leaving a ton of money—we’re talking millions of dollars in sales—on the table and they have no idea,” Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap, tells TechCrunch. “And what we’re seeing with all this Cyber Monday spending is that a lot of shopping is moving online, so retailers really need to have a handle on exactly how much they’re losing due to online checkout problems.” 
 
 And with the significant shift to online shopping, improving efficiency will matter more than ever in the years to come.
– Black Friday sales were up 7% this year over 2014 while Thanksgiving Day sales jumped 16%, according to Slice Intelligence's analysis of online sales data. Not only that, but the weeks leading up to the biggest shopping day of the year saw a 14% boost with many sales starting early, reports TechCrunch. How did individual stores fare? Amazon is clearly happy after reporting its best holiday shopping weekend ever for Amazon devices. But that's not all the site has to be cheering. Here are the five retailers with the biggest shares of online spending on Black Friday: Amazon: 35.7% Best Buy: 8.23% Macy's: 3.38% Walmart: 3.35% Nordstrom: 3.11% (Apparently people were buying a lot of guns.)