Online sales spike on a less chaotic Black Friday

WASHINGTON (AFP) ― The top U.S. shopping “holiday” saw a surge this year in online sales with smaller crowds in stores ― but Black Friday still brought some of its trademark shopping mall pandemonium.

Businesses usually offer deep discounts starting early Friday morning, prompting massive crowds that have led to numerous injuries and a number of deaths in years past.

This year, businesses continued a trend in starting shopping deals earlier and extending them longer, leading to smaller crowds.

But many major retailers, including discount megastore Walmart, also emphasized online shopping as a way to get consumers purchasing faster.

An early report from commercial analyst ChannelAdvisor Corp. showed up to a 22 percent increase in Black Friday online shopping compared to last year.

The firm also reported a 20 percent increase in online sales on Thanksgiving day.

For the first time the majority of online sales came from mobile devices, a report by IBM said.

“Online shopping started while turkeys were still in the oven and yesterday was our second-highest online sales day ever ― topped only by Cyber Monday last year,” said top Walmart executive Laura Phillips on Friday.

Sales data from the National Retail Federation was expected Sunday. Last year’s figures from showed $57.4 billion in total sales over the Black Friday weekend, a drop of 2.7 percent from 2012.

The largest day of online sales typically comes on the Monday following Black Friday, when stores offer a number of online-only discounts.

In United States shopping malls, there were shorter lines and fewer packs of frenzied shoppers on Thursday night and Friday, U.S. media reported.

Still, several people were injured and three were arrested after a shopping fight early Friday morning at a department store in southern California, reports said.

And what appeared to be a murder suicide took place Friday night at a Nordstrom department store in Chicago. Police deemed it “domestic-related,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

This year the shopping day was also caught up in a furor over the decision not to indict the police officer who killed an unarmed black teenager in Missouri. The shooting has put American race-relations under scrutiny and prompted demonstrations over how police, especially white officers, interact with African Americans.

Black public figures called for Black Friday boycotts, and in Ferguson, Missouri, where the killing took place, protests briefly shut down a local mall.

In the west coast city of Seattle, protesters chained a mall’s doors closed, and in California’s San Francisco, hundreds rallied and a police officer was injured by a bottle thrown at a police car, local media reported Friday.

Meanwhile, the FBI estimated it hit more than 144,000 background checks for Black Friday gun sales, CNN reported. Black Friday is one of the busiest days for gun sales in the U.S., the FBI said.

Retailers have been buoyed by predictions that a drop in gas prices and higher consumer confidence could lead to higher sales overall this year.

The start of the U.S. holiday shopping season has slowly been been broken up into a number of shopping days including “Gray Thursday,” “Black Friday,” “Small Business Saturday,” and “Cyber Monday” to prompt December sales.

U.S. president Barack Obama made a surprise visit Saturday morning to a landmark Washington bookstore to support small businesses.