Many online jewelry artisans offered Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales last week. I hope they did well because the stats show more people than ever are shopping online. They prefer to avoid the long line ups and people jams at brick-and- mortar retail stores.  Cnet reported there was a 11% increase in global retail site surfing. How did that translate to sales? Comscore, the industry analysts, puts the total Black Friday sales at $595 million - an 11% increase over last year. It could be an optimistic sign of economic recovery but it also reflects heavy discounting by merchants to get sales.



The biggest online winners were Amazon (13.5% of visits) and Walmart (11.2%). There were also over 1 million transactions on eBay, the world's largest online auction site on that hectic day. There is an interesting eBay heat map Facebook application which shows all the buying and selling on the site in the US. This Virtual Earth - eBay collaboration lets you zoom using the slider or mouse to hover over the  map to see how many buyers and sellers there are. The yellow areas indicate lower numbers of transactions whereas the red areas show the greatest activity.

If you're not interested in the Facebook app, you can still see a non-interactive video of it in action. It is amazing to watch the transactions light up on the map over the course of 24 hours!



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