Dive Brief:

• Black Friday web sales grew more than 20% this year, according to several measures released this weekend. Internet sales on Black Friday, for example, increased 20.6% over last year, according to Custora. 

• Thanksgiving, which has become a sort of sleeper shopping day for online sales, saw mobile sales outpace computer web sales for the first time, according to IBM’s Retail Black Friday report. Phones and tablets made up 52.1% of e-sales on Thanksgiving, which saw e-sales increase 14.3% over 2013, according to IBM. Meanwhile, mobile made for 27.9% of all Black Friday online sales, an increase of 28.2% over last year. 

• IBM’s Black Friday assessment, however, found just a 9.48% e-commerce sales increase. The IBM Black Friday report also found that Black Friday’s online sales this year were more than 63.47% of overall sales, compared to Thanksgiving Day this year.

Dive Insight:

Any assessment of Black Friday at this early date is by necessity a quick-and-dirty one. The IBM study, though worth mentioning, is something of an outlier here when it comes to early Black Friday overall web sales reports.

Still, the showing from this variety of studies is an indication of the blurring of e-commerce and brick-and-mortar. And the increases in Black Friday web sales, whatever the size, could affect Cyber Monday sales results. Above all, this appears to be a story of mobile capabilities taking over, boosting sales at physical stores as well as e-commerce.