Online shoppers spend more on Thanksgiving Day

Latest data show that online shoppers splurged more on commodities at Thanksgiving Day this year than they used to for the holiday.

Shoppers spent more than $1.7 billion on online purchases on Thursday, which showed an increase of 25 percent from the same period of time last year, beating market prediction of an 18 percent increase, Xinhua cited an Adobe Digital Index (ADI) report as saying on Friday.

Adobe Digital Index publishes reports on digital marketing based on the analysis of anonymous, aggregated data of more than 5,000 companies worldwide.

For the first time on Thanksgiving Day, mobile phones dominated the online traffic, accounting for 57 percent of online visits, according to the Adobe Digital Index's Friday report.

"I use smartphones to do holiday shopping a lot, it is very convenient," said Connie Fang, 24, a student in New York. She added that online purchases made up nearly 90 percent of her total shopping this year.

Although not everyone who did "window shopping" on their tablets or smartphones had made purchases, the total mobile sales rose drastically.

Mobile sales made up 37 percent of Thursday's online sales, which was 20 percent higher than the same day last year.

The Thanksgiving Day was just a start. "We expect retailers will offer exclusive savings each day of the big weekend, including Black Friday-only deals and even extended Cyber Monday promotions throughout the week that follows," said Matthew Shay, President and CEO of the US National Retail Federation.

"But this weekend is not the end-all-be-all; it's important to remember, there will be several important weekends to keep an eye on before we wrap up the holiday season."

In its "2015 Holiday Shopping Predictions" report issued earlier, Adobe Digital Index predicted that Americans will spend an upward of $83 billion online this holiday season, representing the biggest share of annual sales and the highest online sales in history.