BY Ketki Saxena
Investing.com -- Shopify (TSX:SHOP) stock closed the day up 4.39%, among the top performers on the TSX today, after the commerce company shared its Black Friday figures over the weekend.
Record Black Friday sales boosted hope for the beleaguered stock and the larger e-commerce sector, even as traditional in-store retailers in the U.S. saw little change from the same day last year.
Shopfiy sales rose 17% year over year US$3.36 billion, a new Black Friday record. Meanwhile, data from in-store shopping showed a muted traffic increase that fell short of the retailer expectations. Preliminary data from Sensormatic Solutions showed in-store traffic in the U.S. rose 2.9% year over year.
Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify said, "Black Friday Cyber Monday has grown into a full-on shopping season. The weekend that started it all is still one of the biggest commerce events of the year, and our merchants have broken Black Friday sales records again”.
Shopify said that by 1AM EST in North America on Black Friday, Shopify merchants had already crossed US $1B in sales, By 12:01 p.m EST, global sales had reached their peak of US $3.5 million in sales per minute.
Apparel and accessories were the top product categories, followed by health and beauty, and home and garden. The highest number of purchases were made in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in the company’s home ground of Canada.
Daniel Chan, analyst at TD (TSX:TD) Securities notes that Shopify results “suggest that consumer spending remains strong and online channels continue to be favoured”. He also noted that the results imply “that Shopify is successfully growing its average customer and/or helping merchants upsell.”
Shopify stock has run up 23% over the past three months, while the S&P/TSX Composite has declined 4.7%.
However, SHOP stock remains down 74.33% year over year as it struggles to regain the momentum from the dramatic but short lived shift to online shopping during the pandemic.