Black Friday saw $1.2 billion from desktop sales alone

66.1 million people visited online retail sites on Black Friday using a desktop computer, up 16%

This weekend, it was reported that this year's Black Friday online sales had reached a record high, going up nearly 19% year to year. But we were not given any actual numbers.

Now we are finally starting to get some hard numbers to hang our hats on. And they are a doozy.

Black Friday sales on desktop alone reached nearly $1.2 billion, according to data supplied by comScoreon Sunday.

The $1.198 billion spent was an increase of 15% from 2012, while Thanksgiving Day did even better, rising 21%, to $766 million.

So far, in total, $20.6 billion has been spent online so far this year, a 3% increase from the same time last year, but credits that to the condensed shopping season, which is the shortest since 2002, with only 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

"The season-to-date growth rate is being artificially suppressed in the short term, with the effects likely to normalize as the season progresses," comScore said.

Anyway, lets get back to the numbers, even if they are inflated.

A total of 66.1 million Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday using a desktop computer, an increase of 16% versus year ago. Amazon topped the list of most visited sites, followed by eBay, Walmart, Best Buy and Target. 

Unfortunately, comScore did not give any hard numbers of how many visitors each site got.

And, finally, here is what we were spending our money on: 28% of the dollars went to apparel, 19% to computer hardware, 7% to consumer electronics, 5% to consumer packed goods and shipping services. The other 36% went to other categories.

It should be noted that these numbers do not include any mobile numbers. Perhaps comScore will be releasing those separately, and it will be interesting to see how they compare to desktop.

We already have some indication that the numbers will be awfully big.

According to data released by IBM this weekend, mobile traffic grew to 39.7% of all online traffic, an increase of 34% over last year's Black Friday 2012. Meanwhile, mobile sales reached 21.8% of total online sales, an increase of almost 43% year-over-year.

All of this, of course, is expected to be dwarfed by this year's Cyber Monday sales. 

ComScore is projecting $2 billion in sales on Cyber Monday alone, which would be a pretty significant leap over the $1.46 billion in sales last year, a 20% year-over-year growth rate.

"Cyber Monday will be the heaviest online spending day in history with $1.8 billion in desktop e-commerce – and likely more than $2 billion when accounting for mobile commerce," said comScore. 

(Image source: https://www.visualphotos.com)